


Aid in Living

by LieutenantSaavik, sciencebutch



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), Doctor Who (TV Movie 1996)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Ice Skating, Idiots in Love, Picnics, Slow Burn, Slow Dancing, Tenderness, The Doctor (Doctor Who) is an Idiot, also metaphors, but for only one (1) person, but we're like, for the other its the fastest goddamn romance you've ever seen, no prior knowledge of the eighth doctor necessary just know he's oblivious and romantic and dramatic, read this for the sheer drama of it all, seriously he falls in love too easily, tasteful about the metaphors, the doctor doesn't know missy is the master and missy is sure as hell not about to tell him, theres a lot of metaphors, we promise theres a lot of drama
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-16 10:53:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21506701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LieutenantSaavik/pseuds/LieutenantSaavik, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sciencebutch/pseuds/sciencebutch
Summary: The Doctor and Missy walk into a diner.What Happens Next May Shock You."Thank you,” Missy says at last, though the Doctor can’t be sure what she’s responding to. “This will be a happy memory.” She swings their clasped hands between them like they’re much younger than they are. “You’re very wise, Doctor; thank you. And thank you for more than that.”"Well," the Doctor says, blushing somewhat under her praise, "950 years has to count for something in the wisdom department, I'd hope."Selfishly, Missy wants to press him to her, lace their fingers together. Instead, she ponders what he said to her. “You’re my present,” she says eventually, with a small twitter at the double meaning. Just now she has, as best she can, laid two souls to rest."
Relationships: Eighth Doctor/Missy (Doctor Who), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who)
Comments: 53
Kudos: 74





	1. Diners and Diatribes

**Author's Note:**

> does it count as a f/m fic if the 'f' fell in love with the 'm' when she herself was an m and the 'm' is actually canonically nonbinary in several of his spinoff works
> 
> anyway
> 
> hope (sciencebutch) wrote for the ebullient eighth doctor and kora (lieutenantsaavik) wrote for the idiotic missy

Do you ever just know some shit is about to go down and you _ know _ you’re in a position to step in and help, but you sit back because you really actually just want to see the drama go down?

No?

Pathetic. Let’s set the scene.

  
  


It’s cold outside, almost freakish for the typical climate, heralding either a difficult winter or a long-lasting bout of climate change. Had either of the Time-Lords in the vicinity wanted to, they could have hopped forward a decade or so to find out whether or not there was an incoming disaster (and cause said incoming disaster if it would not provide itself), but TimeLord #1 is far too good, and TimeLord #2 is far too bored.

Which two Time-Lords, you ask? Names are complex, and they’ve both had many. But I’m sure you can guess who they are.

Inside, the air is warm--if uncomfortably sticky. It’s a seedy diner, but then again, most diners are. A layer of grease clings to tables like a membrane and a heavy, oily haze hangs about; but TimeLord #1 still maintains the notion that they have the best alien-equivalent to human chips this side of the universe, and so here he is. He’s been in worse places, anyway.

The Doctor (because I’m sure you’ve figured this out by now) is proud to say that he’s a regular, and that he has a usual order that the waiters knew down pat: a serving of chips and a cup of tea. He thought it was nice to have a usual, and be a regular, because his life is decidedly lacking both of those words, and, well. A change of pace is good sometimes.

He’s sitting in his booth, adding a whopping six sugars to his tea (and is in deep consideration about adding another), when another humanoid figure across the way attracts his glance.

I’ll let you in on a secret: she’s TimeLord #2, but the Doctor doesn’t know it yet.

She wears a deep purple dress that resembles something out of Earth’s 19th century, and even the Doctor thinks that’s odd. He’s so caught up in trying to make heads or tails of her that he doesn’t notice the rather blatant fact that, well, he’s  _ staring _ .

That humanoid figure--the second Time-Lord, of course, though she’d prefer the term ‘Time-Lady’--is scanning the room. The locals, she’s thinking, are of various species she has no interest in dominating.

She is, as I said before, bored.

It’s to be expected, she supposes. After thirteen--or fourteen?--lifetimes of evil, she’s basically done all there was to do. Even sadism lost its flavour, eventually; not that she'd ever admit it. 

In search of something that would not lose its flavour, she’d found herself (barely touching the door, it was so grimy) entering the light, warmth, and overpowering food-smell of the dirty diner, casting a glance around the room to catalogue the eclectic--and to her mind, lowly--mismash of species. They’re mostly Slitheen-esque, stupid bumblers with watery, half-drunk eyes. There are a few species that look Time-Lord, probably human-descended or human-adjacent. Her cursory overview notes nothing else of importance, except, oh yeah, half-blocked by someone else's shoulder, the young man shamelessly staring at her.

It takes her a moment to recognise him. He wears a face she hasn't seen in a long, long time.

They meet eyes. The Doctor does not avert his. He does, however, smile in a way that could be described as charming if you didn’t know him, and less so if you did (simply because it was obvious he never really made an effort to be charming; it just tended to happen, and he makes a bad habit of exploiting that for what it was worth). 

After a moment, he waves.

‘How embarrassing,’ Missy (that’s her current name, and she’s had a worse one, so be polite), thinks. He clearly doesn’t know her, which can only mean he acts like this around everyone. She’d roll her eyes if she weren’t so intrigued by his presence. The Diner and the Doctor, hm? It's shaping up to be an interesting day. 

She turns her lips up at the corners and makes her way over to him, manoeuvring around the un-cleaned tables, pulling up her skirt periodically to avoid spilled food. The Doctor’s face brightens as she gets closer; he had come here alone, and to his mind, nothing made a meal of chips and tea better than a friendly conversation. Missy, for her part, almost laughs at the Doctor being seen in a place like this, before remembering that she’s, well, also here.

Feeling bold, she sits down across from him, inclining her chin slightly in lieu of a proper greeting. Immediately, he leans his head closer to hers.

“Hello,” he says, with unmissable joy. “I couldn’t help but notice you’re dressed rather oddly for the time and place.” It was either extremely rude or the beginnings of a raunchy pick up line, though the Doctor didn’t intend for it to be either.

Missy raises an eyebrow. "You're one to talk,” she remarks. 

The Doctor looks down at himself, remembers what this body has a penchant for wearing (though it was lightyears better than anything his other incarnations had worn), and looks back up. “I suppose I am.”

Missy’s eyes flick from the Doctor's outfit to his face to his chips and back to his face again as she reaches over, delicately takes the longest and crispiest chip, and eats it solemnly, without breaking eye contact.

The Doctor is only slightly dismayed. Shaking off her disappointment, she smiles sticky sweet. “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” she asks, holding out a hand. “I'm Missy.”

“The Doctor.” He takes the hand Missy had offered and kisses the back of it in greeting. It surprises Missy, and a flinch—before she can suppress it—is her natural reaction. 

“Careful,” she says, with more sincerity than she’d intended, as she retracts her hand. “Some people might be averse to such affectionate formalities.”

It was a tad hypocritical of her to say, I think, when you consider how she had force-kissed the Doctor in her lair of future Cybermen, but I digress. Fact is, this Doctor’s action surprised her. Perhaps it was the fact that the brief hand-kiss is the most affection she’s been shown in some time. Don’t start feeling bad for her, though; the whole ex-mass-murderer thing sort of kills the touch-starved vibe. Still, Missy is having thoughts--I know, I’m as surprised as you that a Time-Lord who used to call herself ‘the Master’ can actually have thoughts, but she can, I assure you--and we oughta listen to ’em.

It certainly wasn’t that she didn’t want affection, or that she didn’t want affection from the Doctor. She did; she fairly starved for it some days. But this was the wrong Doctor, the wrong era. This Doctor is young, almost blithe, and doesn’t know her—which skews the whole conversation in her favour, she realises with a smirk.  _ Don’t get too close, _ she warns herself.  _ One conversation only.  _ Anything else would be paradoxical, and—because she knows well the fate this Doctor meets—maybe even disrespectful. 

“Are you?” the Doctor asks, breaking into her thoughts.

“Hm?”

“Averse to such things?” he gives a polite smile. "If so, I do apologize."

‘ _ No, it was nice _ ,’ she resists the urge to say. Yes, that would make the Doctor like her--and yes, as an afterthought, it's true. But to say so would ascribe far more significance to the gesture than it's worth when it's just a simple greeting, so she just gives a semi-affectatious shrug instead, and decides to change the subject. “What should I order?” she asks, faux-casual. 

The Doctor takes a chip from the basket in front of him and takes a bite. “The tea is mediocre, though once you've drunk tea with Laozi, you find other cuppas rather lacking - something about how emphatic he was about tea being 'liquid jade' and the 'elixir of life'...”  _ Not that I need any more of that _ , he thinks to himself in the moment of silence his lack of voice left. “I'd recommend the chips, obviously,” he goes on, “And, hm....” he peruses the menu. His face lights up as he sees something that is actually quite good (in his opinion, anyway). “Aha! This -  _ this _ was really quite tasty.” He points at its location on the menu. It is--somewhat pathetically, I’d say--the Raxacoricofallapatorian equivalent to chicken nuggets.

Missy looks at where the Doctor’s hand is pointing and nearly winces. “That seems edible,” she lies. “Inasmuch as any of the food here is. Come here often?” she asks, then adds a small clarification. “This planet, I mean. You're not from around here; if it isn't rude, where are you from?"

What she wants, I’ll note, is for his face to light up as he says “Gallifrey,” and for him to tell her all about it, every glittering detail--the refraction of light on the domes, the twin suns, the red fields. To describe it as it is for him, as it used to be for her.  _ Because it’s so alive for him _ , Missy realises.  _ So solid. _ That’s something she can never have again. And part of her suddenly wants to yell at him, to warn him about what's about to happen--and she hates that, not just because it's unfeasible but because it's right.  _ No _ , she tells herself.  _ That urge to protect is his, not yours. _

The Doctor smiles and puts the menu down. This body likes to gesticulate while he talks. "I do find myself frequenting this establishment when I’m on my own. There’s something about it… it’s quaint--in a good way, of course. And I'm from...oh, all around. Here, there, everywhere; never found it in me to settle down, really.”

"You don't have a home?" she asks in stupefaction. This is confusing; surely Gallifrey means something to him? But it makes sense, she realises, after a moment. You never miss something until it's gone. One moment, you're insulting the Rani's new regeneration; the next, you're wishing she'd be given just one more. She clears her throat. "A traveller, then,” she says pleasantly. "I'm much the same. I've been spending a great deal of time on Earth, though. Have you been there?"

The Doctor lights up at the mention of Earth, his eyes and smile widening like a flower blooming as it finds sunlight. “Oh - oh yes!” he says, excitement all but dripping from his voice. “Earth! Lovely planet, lovely people, easily my favorite out of the lot! What a - a - a wonderful coincidence we've both been there!"

“Easily your favourite,” says Missy vacantly, “How sad—” and then to cover her reaction, “—Ah, I mean, how sad that you’re so far from it now. You must have a very speedy spaceship to get all the way out here.”  _ Maybe this was a bad ide _ a, she thinks. She doesn’t understand this Doctor. To love Earth more than—it doesn’t bear thinking about. “I’m happy you’ve found somewhere you love,” she says instead, masking her real thoughts. “I don’t have a place like that any more.”

The Doctor's hearts wrench in sympathy. He reaches out and grabs Missy's hand from across the table, loneliness controlling his actions more than anything. He'd begun talking to himself again, after Charley had left. And that was one of the first signs of madness. “Come with me, then,” he offers. “I'll - I can help. Help you find a place like that. Travel with me.”

When he grabs her hand, half of Missy wants to say ‘Don't touch me’ while the other half of her wants to scream ‘Don't  _ stop _ .’ Neither side wins, and she just lets her hand rest limply in the Doctor's as she processes his words. “Come with you,” she repeats, dangerously close to stuttering. This has always been what it takes to stop the Master; as Martha Jones said, “No weapons; just words.”

_ Is this what the Doctor does?  _ she wonders, half-repulsed.  _ Pick up every stray soul? Invite them into his TARDIS, his stolen sanctuary, the safest place he knows of--just because he can?  _ She stares at his face, realises that the Doctor is rarely seen without a companion, but this version of him is very much alone. That, at least, gives some insight into his sudden ‘selflessness.’  _ Is he lonely? _ she thinks. And then,  _ Am I? _

It's a bad idea to go with him. It's dangerous and irresponsible and could have devastating consequences. Fortunately, for Missy, all that translates to the word “fun.”

She really should get up and leave. 

She definitely doesn't.

“Yes. I'd like that,” she says.


	2. Woman Wept (Among Other Things)

The Doctor wasn't expecting her to say yes, and he had already prepared for the twinge of disappointment to shudder down his spine, bracing himself like someone tensing for a particularly strong gust of wind. But she _did_ accept, and it takes a moment for that to register, his brain so ingrained in the pessimistic groove so many denials had worn in. When it does, though, when those four words click, joviality snaps through him like a whip, and he stands up so fast he’s a blur, almost knocking over his tea in the process. He’s still holding onto her hand. 

“Are you absolutely positive?” he asks. Then, without giving Missy a chance to respond, “Wonderful! Splendid! Perfect!”

He makes a move to rush away, but Missy is still at the table, her hand acting as an effective tether. “Come on!” He tugs on her. “Come on, come on come on! There's no time to waste!”

Missy stares at him, practically floored. The Doctor is nearly dancing around her, his hair wild, his eyes wide and shining. His giddiness hits her like a wave; she hasn't seen the Doctor this happy since Gallifrey. And that's it, isn't it? The loss hasn't hit him. Hasn't _killed_ him.

There's a surge of something in Missy's chest; it takes a moment to identify it, since it's such a bizarre concoction. There’s wonder, sheer wonder, at the vividness of his smile (and the fact that it's directed at her)—but a under that, a muddle of confusion. Because he sees her, but he doesn’t—and it throws her off. And, tying all that up with a ribbon, is pure surprise. 

She didn't know she was capable of making someone that happy. But, well, she’s never really tried.

She lets the Doctor pull her up, and doesn’t even spitefully kick a chair out from under someone as she follows him. It’s hard to keep up; the Doctor walks so fast he's almost skipping to the door, and then he's sprinting across the street to his TARDIS, his home, his third heart. 

Yes, he parked it right across from the diner. No, subtlety is not a talent of his.

He turns back to look at Missy as he and his ship stand before her in all of her blue box-y glory. His smile is the sort of smile that hurts when it's over, the kind that makes kids believe that if they smiled for any longer their face would get stuck like that. 

He hasn't been this excited in so long. He hasn't felt this _light_ in so long. His hearts have been like weights, like stones stuffed in his rib cage, and now they were like balloons, or butterflies, or something equally as free. 

“This is my TARDIS,” he explains. “Stands for ‘time and relative dimension in space.’ She's my timeship—or spaceship—however you want to call her. She can go anywhere and any _when_ in the universe!” Bouncing on his feet a bit, he turns around and unlocks her doors and dashes in to the console. Spinning to face Missy, he waits for the inevitable ‘bigger on the inside’ bit with a grin on his face.

His TARDIS, of course, looks almost exactly like when Missy saw it a few hundred years ago. It’s softly-lit at the corners but blue above the console, pervaded with an atmosphere of dust and coziness. It’s also absolutely covered, floor-to-wall, with rugs, tables, bureaus, and assorted luxurious trappings. It would look so, _so_ comfortable, if it hadn't been a place she'd once died. That had hurt, actually. She forces the memory from her mind and mirrors the Doctor's smile.

“It's very decorated,” she says, and then remembers abruptly that vehicles being larger on the inside isn’t something most people are used to. “Ah!” she adds hurriedly, throwing her arms out to her sides. She turns in a circle, hiding her face from the Doctor's while she rehearses a series of widening smiles, then whirls to face him. “Bigger on the inside!” she exclaims, hopping about slightly like she'd seen him do and laughing at his gullibility. “It's—a miracle! How did you—” she backs out of the TARDIS, makes a great show of peering around the sides as if to confirm its external dimensions, then leaps back in. “Bigger on the inside,” she repeats,“Than it is—on the outside! And it travels through time and space?!”

The Doctor, of course, buys this act completely. Ah, he never gets tired of that reaction. The awe, the disbelief—it’s like what he felt, traveling across the universe and seeing increasingly incredible things. He loves seeing his own amazement reflected in others. And, okay, maybe he’s really proud of his TARDIS, and it helps to have someone stroke his ego. But that is neither here nor there.

His eyes light up as he watches her, and with a faux casualness he says, “Oh, is it? I hadn't noticed,” before turning round to face the console. “And it isn't a miracle; just some simple science—well, simple for some. The Old Girl is dimensionally transcendental,” he explains, preemptively flipping some levers and spinning some dials. He isn't really sure what they do, but he likes the sounds they made when he uses them; it adds to the drama. “Anywhere and anywhen!” he says again, turning back around to face Missy and speaking in a conspiratorial (but still very much excited) tone. “So, Missy, where—or when—would you like to go?”

Missy, who is still recovering from actually laughing at his “I hadn't noticed,” covers her smiling mouth with her hand. It's cute—juvenile, but cute—how he calls his TARDIS ‘old girl.’ She never had come up with a long-lasting nickname for hers, probably because it changed its form so frequently.

I’ll tell you, it was a bright blue horse-box once. Horrifying. 

Now, to answer his question. Where or when did she want to go? She thinks back to all the places her past selves might be, makes a mental note to avoid them. “I'm not sure,” she admits, striding toward the console. The only real place she has any desire to see again is Gallifrey. Is there any way—could they?—she starts hoping, then curls a hand into a fist to get rid of the irritating sensation. “Not the future,” she says carefully, unsure exactly how far off the Time-War is. “Not Great Britain in 2009. Or 2015. Or San Francisco in 1999—”

“Oddly specific—”

“Oh, never mind,” says Missy, irritated. “Why don't you—why don't _we_ —head for someplace you like?”

The Doctor, unruffled, peers up and meets Missy’s eyes absently before he perks up with an idea and dashes around the pillar, cranks something, and reaches out to press a button. He gives a meaningful glance to Missy, then flips a lever. 

The cloister bell rings, and the TARDIS begins dematerialising with its tell-tale groaning. “Woman Wept!” he says, seemingly out of the blue, “A planet—not a person; that’d be a bit dreary for a first trip though, wouldn’t it? Anyway, Woman Wept! An unpopulated planet whose continental land mass resembles a woman, well, weeping. I haven’t seen it in a while, though I’ve heard its oceans have frozen over due to something or other happening to its sun.”

Missy nods agreement. It's disappointing, but it's fine. She's heard of Woman Wept; it's one of those 26 planets the Daleks stole (will steal, by the Doctor’s timeline). It was a nice enough place until its sun went out; then it froze solid in a single instant and hasn’t thawed a millimeter. On a deserted planet, there's nothing to take over, so there's not much to do; as such, she never really got around to visiting. “Sounds positively thrilling,” she says with a bright smile and thick sarcasm she knows he'll miss. “So long as it’s the planet, and not stone angels, doing the,” she wiggles her fingers in front of her eyes, “Weeping business.”

The Doctor gives her a look of confusion. _Oh, you’ve got a treat coming,_ Missy thinks to herself. She coughs lightly to cover the awkwardness. “I'm excited to see it,” she says archly, and then, “Thank you.”

I’ll tell you: delete the words “it” and “thank,” and her sentence would be true.

“And _I’m_ ,” the Doctor says gleefully, because the TARDIS has reached its destination, “Excited to show it to you.” He opens the doors, revealing the planet itself, the picturesque view only heightened by the phalanx of stars surrounding it. The TARDIS rotates slowly above the surface, suspended as if on a string. “Careful not to fall out,” he warns. “I thought I’d show it to you from the bird’s eye view first.” His eyes sparkle with rapture. “I’ve never seen it like this,” he says quietly, focused on the vista and not even noticing as Missy steps up to join him. “The water frozen, a picture of a single moment, eternalized. Even from here, you can see how the light glitters on the crystalline waves. It’s amazing what beauty you can find in something so lifeless.”

Missy gazes at the frozen sea, expecting to quickly turn from it back to the Doctor's face, but as he speaks, she finds her vision landing on the tiny irregularities in the planet's frozen waves, the way the sun catches and outlines the imperfections, making them glitter more. The ocean looks wrong, fixed bluntly as it is; past the cresting ‘shore,’ the huge expanse of ice stretches dizzyingly far, unnaturally flat and foreign. Even the foam on the waves has transformed and hardened. It’s desolate.

And it's _extraordinary_.

‘A single moment eternalised.’ And that's what this feels like, the two of them side by side, peering out from the TARDIS doors at something utterly magnificent.

Old words echo in her mind: ‘We could see every star in the universe…’ 

“You're right,” she murmurs, then goes stiff. But this Doctor doesn't know her; that admission doesn't matter. There's something stirring in her, seeing the Doctor again. Old loyalty bubbling up. Because suddenly, like this, she can see the skies as he does; not something to be conquered, but something to be praised.

The Doctor tears up from the brightness, and scrubs his eyes with the sleeve of his frock coat. “Is it too bright for you?” he asks. “I think I have some sunglasses somewhere…” he says, patting down his pockets.

“No sunglasses,” says Missy quickly. She wants him to see her eyes.

She’s not sure where this sudden urge to bare herself is coming from. This new, unflinching honesty. Perhaps it’s the days of vault-bound isolation. Perhaps it’s the planet’s unforgiving cold. Perhaps it’s the Doctor’s unadulterated brightness, a radiance she can’t help but reflect. They were always two sides of one coin, anyway. 

“Woman Wept,” she muses aloud, continuing to stare unblinking at the planet below. Her thoughts are tumbling over themselves, less sharp and almost youthful. “It’s an uninhabited world; it didn’t give itself that name.”

The Doctor looks at her quizzically.

“Someone chose it,” she goes on, less emotionless than she’d like, “And the planet has to live with it now, forever. In the past,” and she gestures vaguely, “The continental landmass was a continental landmass. Now, with the name we chose, it’s a woman crying.” 

She could stop there, but she feels like she has to explain this, somehow. “That image is in our heads because of its name; it will never _not_ be a woman crying.” She relaxes for a moment, then forges forward again. “And it might be different if the planet had chosen its name, had chosen ‘Women Wept’ for itself. Say it did. But if it wanted to change its name, if it wanted to—even after so long—be something else, could it be something else? And, if so—could we see it as something else?”

The Doctor gives her a long, considering glance. He swallows thickly, stares down at the frozen sea. The land mass that depicted a woman weeping. It hasn’t always shown that, but it always will, he supposes.

There’s a moment of silence. Missy’s words dangle and ring in his head, echoing like windchimes.

“It’s quite sad, really,” he says at last, “To be forever destined to be seen in a state of lament. All it takes is one person, one person confined to melancholy, to notice something dismal in something so inherently neutral as a continent, and all it takes is one person to name that continent, and for that name to spread like a cancer across the universe.” He pauses.“What if they’d been happy,” he asks after a tick of quiet, his voice subdued. “The person who named it. What would they have seen instead?”

“Probably the same thing," says Missy brusquely. Whatever hit her like a wave has passed like one, too. “It does rather look like tears. Or it would, if the water still flowed.”

She eyes the Doctor critically, wonders how long he wants to two of them to linger in the air as the planet spins below them. She’s surprised his TARDIS hadn't practically upended itself trying to shake her out; it recognises her, surely?

“Should we go down to the surface, do you think?” she asks.

The Doctor is silent, lost in pensiveness for just one more moment. Then, he grins and says, "Now you're getting it! Let's go!" 

He dashes back to the console, grabbing her hand in the process. “Let me take her down to the surface.”

Missy follows again; she loves the feeling of his hand in hers. Here's the affection her dear Scottish grump wouldn't give her; it makes her realise how long she'd gone without it, and how much she'd craved it. ‘ _That’s the trouble with hope_ ,’ he’d said, as he pulled his hands from hers. Why did that hurt her?

She shoves the thoughts from her head; they're prickly. The TARDIS doors are still flapping open behind them, and regretfully she takes her hand from the Doctor's and slips away to close them, pressing her fingers into the wood to ground herself with the sensation.

The Doctor uses his now-free hand to steer the TARDIS, so engrossed in his task of getting them down to the surface he hadn’t realized she’d let go. As soon as they’re set to materialize, he claps his hands and looks around for his new companion. Seeing her by the doors, he calls out, “I'd be careful if I were you! Opening the doors mid-flight is a bad idea—gets the Vortex in your head.”

“I'm closing the doors," Missy snaps, "Not opening them. I know how a TARDIS works.” She collects herself. The Vortex in her head, the ceaseless pounding _pain_ of it—she’s felt it. “I mean—I don't know,” she corrects. “But I can imagine why that would be dangerous, yes.” She steps back from the doors, brushes her hands down her skirt, then turns to the Doctor with an insincere smile as he tucks a strand of hair behind his ear and straightens the lapels of his coat. 

Reminded of clothes, he looks Missy over and asks: "Will you be warm enough in that? I probably have another coat laying around somewhere around here..."

It’s a completely neutral request, but Missy considers it carefully. Time-Lords define themselves by their clothes as much as they do by their faces. They change one only when they change the other; that’s generally how it goes, so her first reaction is to refuse. But then again, she isn’t exactly herself here—not as she traditionally defines herself, anyway. Wear something different, visually divide this event from everything else she's experienced, and it can be compartmentalised and forgotten when it needs to be. A new outfit would free her, somewhat. And keep her warm.

“I'd love to wear a spare coat, if you have one,” she admits.

The Doctor pats himself down as if expecting to miraculously find one on his person. He half-heartedly casts his eyes around the room, and, spotting none, says: “I don’t appear to have one in here. Let’s head to the closet and look there, hm?”

Missy giggles. “Sounds amenable,” she agrees, but the prospect is oddly... well, it's oddly _odd_ . Seeing the Doctor's clothes? Including his old things, maybe? No, it's not exactly thrilling. But it is—just maybe—more intimate than she'd like. Her Doctor has come into her vault, sure, but he's never poked through her things! Oh, except that one time he made sure she didn't have enough smooth-bore steel to build a bazooka. “On _god_ , Doctor,” she'd said, “If I needed such a primitive weapon to conquer a place, I just wouldn't _bother_.”

“You're sure you're fine to have me... look at your... accessories?” she asks. Who knows what he's got stashed away? He could have—a cold feeling ricochets through her—he could have something of hers. And that thought keys in another one; the reminder of the brooch she's wearing. The one the Doctor gave her on Gallifrey long ago. As soon as this Doctor isn't looking at her, she unpins it from her shirt and palms it, hiding it in a fold of her skirt.

The Doctor shoots her a look. “Of course,” he says, “Why wouldn’t I be? They’re just clothes — ooh!” he gasps, “And hats! Should I wear a hat, do you think?” he pauses for a moment, thinking hard about it. “Doesn’t matter. We can find out when we get there. Follow me!” he says, grabbing Missy’s hand a third time and rushing up the stairs to the door that lead to the rest of the TARDIS. He leads her through a hallway, before stopping dead. 

“Oh, she’s moved it,” he says, “Usually it’s a few more rights and lefts and turnarounds before we get there.” He smiles at her. “Maybe the Old Girl likes you.”

Missy scrunches her face. _That_ can't be right; this thing must hate her. It _should_ hate her. The most recent time she was in it she, no, he, no, she—she has to think of that person as herself because he is, even though she hates it—hates it? does she hate it? what does that mean—she had fallen—

Yes, she remembers. She had fallen into the Eye of Harmony, the heart of this—and every—TARDIS. She had killed two people, people the Doctor rather loved. And still, he had reached for her; still, he had offered her a chance to live. Because that's who he is; that's what he does. Advice and assistance obtainable. Immediately.

“Or maybe she's playing a very cruel joke,” Missy replies, because, pushed to the front of the TARDIS's collection, is a familiar black coat.

"Oh?” asks the Doctor. “Maybe she is! She's been known to pull some nasty practical jokes — especially on April Fools Day. Except the problem is that April Fools Day doesn't exist in the Vortex, so she just sort of… springs it on you. Keeps you on your toes," he says, rifling through hangers. "Now, let's see..." he says, turning to rummage through a box of miscellaneous clothes. "Would you like an overcoat? A shawl, perhaps? I actually had Arachne weave me one once…” he pauses, “That whole spider business was a right shame; she was quite good, and very skilled at parcheesi…” he turns to look at her, and sees Missy staring at a leather coat. 

“Oh, this?” he asks her. “Are you interested? It belonged to one of my friends, once. I mean, I say ‘friend’... more like an enemy, he is— _was_ ,” he sobers, then tries to force a smile on his face. It's very strained. He's had too many losses in the past few years. “You can use it. Leather isn't really my thing.”

“I hate it,” Missy says bluntly. 'Why didn't you burn it,' a question with no inflection that she really wants to ask. The TARDIS showing it to her sends a very clear message, but what 'the old girl' means by it, she can't tell.

She got lost in this TARDIS, see. Practically digested. She realises with irritation that, though she remembers the sucking, squelching experience of escaping, she still doesn't have the faintest idea how it happened. The TARDIS must have just... spat her soul out somehow. Just in time for the Time-Lords to resurrect her for war. When, instead of fighting for them, she sprinted to their citadel, to the prison-like maze of storage beneath it, to a TARDIS, any TARDIS, and she flew to the ends of the universe. _Fled_ to the ends of the universe. Not to explore, like the Doctor did. Just to hide. For some reason, she had chosen coward over killer, a decision she wouldn't make again. It made her a draft-dodger, she supposed. Gallifrey's first and only.

“I'll take this instead, if it's no trouble,” she says, lost in thoughts, laying a hand on a random coat. Too late, she realises it belonged to the Doctor's sixth regeneration. “Beautiful,” she says sardonically, sliding it off its hanger. “April Fools may not exist in the Time-Vortex, but Pride Month certainly does.”

The Doctor hides a grin behind one of his fists. “Oh, do you really like it?” he asks, trying to stifle a laugh. “I must admit, my sixth body did not have nearly the predisposition for fashion as I do, but,” a snicker escapes his mouth, “As you so clearly want it, feel free to take it. To each their own, and all. I remember it being quite warm.”

Missy sees the Doctor’s half-hidden grin and mirrors it. _He’s so charming, and almost entirely involuntarily_ , she thinks. _Hope this doesn’t awaken anything in me._

She takes the coat and swishes it over her shoulders. “Yes, that’s right; have a good snigger, why don’t you,” she says with no real bite. “Thus prepared, shall we adventure?”

The various colors contrast _completely_ with the deep purple of Missy's skirt, and the ensemble makes the Doctor giggle even more. He tries to conceal it with a cough. "Yes, yes," he says, attempting seriousness. "Let's adventure. Onwards!"

He takes one last glance at Missy. "You really can choose something else, you know."

“What are you implying, my dear Doctor?” she asks, the old endearment slipping out of its own accord. “I think it’s a positively ravishing ensemble.” She offers the Doctor her hand (in an odd reversal), then withdraws it. “But you haven’t picked out anything. Won’t you be cold?”

The Doctor practically gleams when she offers him her hand, calls him her “dear Doctor” (and there's something about the term that sends nostalgia thrashing through him), and he's about to reach out and grab it, when she pulls it away. He visibly deflates. “Hm?” he says, distracted and a little (a lot) disappointed. “Oh, yes.” He looks considerably down at himself. It's a nice outfit, keeps the heat in most times, but it’s positively frigid out there, and he's unsure of the insulation ability of velvet. “Not sure, to be quite honest. Should I pick something else out?"

Missy surreptitiously slides the brooch from her hand into the coat pocket. “Your decision, of course,” she says lightly. “I doubt the fate of the universe hinges on the addition of another layer. Naturally you’ll look simply electric in any of these, ah...” she debates for a while what to call the Doctor’s assortment of clothes. “These... looks. And,” she adds quickly, “When you’ve decided, do take my hand. I’ll need something to warm me, since you don’t appear to have a selection of gloves.”

She ignores the selection of gloves.

The Doctor also ignores the selection of gloves.

“Oh, you'd be surprised," he chuckles. “I remember one time I visited this planet where it was a social convention to wear at least fifty layers. You would have thought the universe was ending with how they reacted with my presence.”

Only the Doctor would find himself in a predicament like that. Missy smirks. “Scandalous.”

“Mhm,” he says jovially, perusing his collection of cloaks and scarves and hats and not gloves. He grabs a black cape his third incarnation wore and throws it on with a smooth and practiced movement, the muscle memory returning even after six bodies. “Would a hat be too much, do you think?" he asks.

Missy smiles at the cape. Ah, the seventies. She liked that version of the Doctor. She liked that version of herself, the one who tentatively fought him; so stiff he was silly, so uptight he was almost repressed. Horrible beard. Decent outfit. Gone too soon; always in her hearts. Anyway.

“A hat might well suit you,” she replies. “I used to wear one. Just don't pick one that obscures any of your face. It's,” she flicks her eyebrows up, “A good one.” In a fluid movement, she offers her hand again.

The Doctor—after trying on a few hats—ditches that idea and turns back around. “Oh, stop it,” he giggles shyly. He grabs her hand, which has been extended to him for some time, and begins walking. “Although, for the record,” he says clandestinely, leaning in a bit closer than is strictly necessary, "I'm rather inclined to agree; I rather lucked out with the eyebrows this go 'round.” He pulls on her and begins rushing down the hall. “Anyway! Yes! Off we go!”

Missy stares at the side of his face as they dash off yet again. His coat is warm, and she hates how much she likes that. His hand is warm (for a Time Lord), and she hates how much she likes _that_. She keeps pace with him easily, skirt swishing around her ankles, heels clicking a little on the TARDIS floor. She can see, hear, and feel everything around her. But then, from one step to the next, something is just slightly... off. 

It’s like she’s looking at herself in the third-person. That, and the sudden sense that there’s someone else there. Something well-contained but angry, disgusted, and in pain. And just as soon as she registers it, it’s gone. She breaks her stride, but keeps the Doctor’s hand in hers. “I’m fine,” she says, to preemptively stave off a question. “I just tripped.” 

Yes, it could be that the TARDIS has found her out and doesn’t like her. It _must_ be that the TARDIS found her out and doesn’t like her. 

Missy dismisses her thoughts and lets the Doctor lead her out into the cold.


	3. Ice Skater's Waltz

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NOTE: there is a playlist for this fic! idk maybe you should.....take a listen......perhaps [HERE]
> 
> ANOTHER NOTE: sorry for the long breaks in updating -__-. finals week really be like that

The Doctor stares at Missy for a long time. The woman he had spotted in a dingy cafe on an alien planet wearing historical clothing from Earth. The woman who both liked and hated touch, who had a hidden depth twinkling behind her eyes, like a clear lake that looks shallow but is actually quite deep. There is something concealed there, in the laugh and frown lines creased in Missy’s face, a history that he desperately wants to know. 

And yes, yes, he knows that curiosity killed the cat. But satisfaction brought it back. So there.

He doesn’t respond to her excuse. He pretends to ignore it, and opens the doors with a flourish. Cold air immediately rushes in, and the Doctor is glad he grabbed a coat. Well, cape. 

Outside, frozen waves form hills and valleys of crystal. The rough violence of the ocean has been chilled into something sharp and biding, icicles hanging from the crests of waves like weapons laying in wait. He’s reminded of the Caves of Kgnox, where diamond stalactites seeped from the ceiling, and aquamarine stalagmites sprouted from the floor. The Doctor stares for a moment, engrossed in the sight before him, before tightening his grip on Missy’s hand and stepping out. “Watch your step; it’s slippery.”

Missy clasps the Doctor's hand tightly. Even in these bodies, as two people who were never supposed to have met, they fit together. 

She can see her breath. The air is so frigid it cuts the throat all the way to the lungs. She squints into the brightness of the sun on the ice. She can see for seeming miles, since the air is so still. They are the only life disturbing this place. 

Ignoring the Doctor's warning, she takes her first step out. Her foot crunches, adjusts to the ice's slickness, and steadies. She can almost feel the Doctor's eyes examining her face. He's curious about her, and she can play that game. She pulls the coat tighter around her. “Six bodies?” she asks, bringing up the line he’d thrown away nonchalantly earlier. “You must have lived a long time. I suppose by now everyone you meet must remind you of someone you've met before.”

The Doctor smiles to himself. "I'm on my eighth one currently," he corrects, "And I have lived a long time; nearly 950 years. And in that time, I've found that everyone is unique in their experiences. Everyone… I suppose some people can remind me of others superficially, or in small mannerisms, but…” he trailed off. "Well, they're always different one way or another. It's one of the best things about people, I've found: everyone is unique, no matter how many quirks they may share.  ”

950 years. She's practically spent that long in the vault. Well, sure, she’s taken breaks, but 950 years was more or less the agonizing, stuffy principle of the thing. Missy isn't fond of principles. She's not sure if she's pleased that she doesn't seem to remind the Doctor of one of her older selves. “Hm,” she says articulately. “You're a bit mysterious.”

“I'm hardly mysterious!" the Doctor exclaims, affronted, "I'm practically transparent!" he pauses, then tacks on a "Mostly," because there are simply some things he’d rather not divulge, even to himself. 

“A 950-year-old Doctor of nothing in particular who frequents shady diners far from home,” Missy continues with a grin.

“That about sums me up,” he says, before another thought leaps into his head. “You know, I've just realized that this place would be quite lovely to go ice-skating on! Have you ever been? It's wonderful; wind in your hair, grace inherent as you glide across ice, carving your path as you go, every moment recorded, every movement noted…”

The Doctor would have kept going, had Missy not cut off his tangent. He’s gotten into the nasty habit of soliloquizing.

“Ice-skating, you say?” She's all for blades and leaving indelible marks on far-off places. “Yes, please. But could we just walk a bit, first? Perhaps we could climb that wave.” She turns to the Doctor and levels him with a bit of a stare. There's something she wants to say to him.

“It’s not like we’re in any rush,” the Doctor says warmly. “We can stay for as long as you like.” 

They walk a bit in silence, their feet crunching the ice in-sync. Then Missy gathers her courage. 

“You're comfortable,” she says at last. “You seem to--” to what? what is it she gets from him? an imagined sense of safety? “I'm enjoying this,” she concludes. “I like you.”

The Doctor smirks at Missy's compliment. “I'm glad you find me comfortable,” he says breezily, a trickle of amusement in his voice, “And I return the sentiment,” he answers, his smirk morphing into a genuine smile.

Missy stiffens at that. She's not comfortable. For anyone. Because everyone around her dies, even if she _doesn’t_ kill them. And that's her own fault; that's her own choice. She almost pulls her hand from the Doctor's. Letting him go, she realizes then, won't just hurt her; it will hurt _him_.

And suddenly everything she's done today, every word she's spoken, every smile she's shared, is just one more cruelty. If she's trying to redeem herself through this, she's failing. Because she's just about to hurt the Doctor one more time.

She is weak. She is very weak. She keeps holding on. 'Woman Wept' is a fitting name for the planet; the cold air, and maybe more than just the cold air, is bringing tears to her eyes.

She ignores them.

Here’s a visual: the frozen waves form a ramp that is shallow enough you can walk up it with minimal trouble, like a bridge that's collapsed halfway through. The Doctor stumbles up it, slipping a little as he goes, and helps Missy up after him. Missy doesn’t need the help, but she likes the sensation of touch. The crest they’re on is like a cliff, and even though they are only a few meters up, the horizon appears very different. The Doctor rushes to the edge and gazes excitedly out at the expanse. "Gorgeous!" he shouts. “Have you ever seen anything like this?!" he laughs. "It's like a planet of infinite crystal, gleaming and sparkling and  _ blinding _ !" 

He whirls to see Missy's reaction, and sobers immediately when he sees that she's on the verge of crying. "Missy?" he questions, "Are you alright?"

She’s not. 

She  _ cares _ , dammit. She has that in her.

She loathes it, she detests it, she wants to eviscerate it, stamp it to the ground until it screams, but the fundamental truth is that she  _ cares _ . About this Doctor, about her Doctor, about the Doctor whose coat she's wearing. About the Doctor whose cloak she's staring at. About the Doctor she killed.

Something clicks.

"Cybermen," she says sharply. How she brought herself, as Missy, back into the Doctor's life. "I understand them now."

Her eyes are vacant.

She’s thinking that there is no way she can ever be, as her Doctor claims, ‘good.’ That she passed that moral event horizon long ago. That, at this point, there’s no ‘making up for it.’ There's no atoning. There's no apology to make to a planet of the dead.

And that, put simply, is why she continued on her path so long. Once you've killed two people, you can't be a good man, so why not kill four? Why not four thousand? Why ever stop killing when it gets you what you want?

So. Cybermen. If enabled to feel, they feel one thing: remorse. They simply cannot cope with all their violence, and they die.

She wants the Doctor to come toward her and comfort her. She wants him to run and never look at her again.

The Doctor does neither of those things. He just sort of blinks at her. "Cybermen?" he questions, confusion scribbled all over his face. “Where did that come from? Missy, I must admit I'm rather perplexed.” 

“I'm just thinking,” Missy goes on, still quiet. “If you were horrid. Like the Cybermen are. If you'd done the type of--if you'd destroyed a planet without caring, if you'd snapped necks when it served your goal, and even when it didn’t. If you'd been someone's worst fear, if you'd reveled in it. If you're the type of person who’d rather save none than save one. If you'd--” she takes a deep and careful breath. “If you were irredeemable. Could you be redeemed?"

That's too heavy a question to unload on someone as young as this Doctor. Perhaps it's too heavy a question for the universe to bear. She forces a smile. “Cold air,” she says by way of excuse. “Makes my brain overactive. Don't concern yourself with me.”

"You sure do have a tendency for asking existential questions," the Doctor remarks bluntly.

Missy laughs, brittle. He puts thought into her question.

"I like to think that anyone can be redeemed, so long as they expend the effort,” the Doctor says, beginning slowly.. “All we can really do is try,” he adds, and thinks about how Charley would call him a hypocrite for holding himself above his own standards for others. "The past is the past, which does sound silly for a time traveller such as myself to say, as much as I muck about in history--perhaps I should say one's personal past is their past, but anyway--it can't be revisited, one's personal past, but it doesn't have to be relived..." he trails off.

_ Doesn’t it, though? _ Missy thinks bitterly.

“We all have our burdens to bear,” the Doctor goes on, “And those burdens make us stronger, like a snapped bone that grows back harder to break.”

Missy contradicts him. “It ought to be relived.” She looks out at the panorama, arcane and stark and chill. “My regret, I mean. I should revisit it. Make sure it hurts, and hurt myself with it. So I never do what caused it again.” 

‘Y _ou’ll save worlds with your regret, Doctor_ ,’ she wants to say.  _ Osgood _ , she thinks.  _ Doctor Chang _ . In her mind, she casts their names out across the ice. They deserve someone weeping for them. Perhaps this planet will do. 

The Doctor shoots a considering glance at Missy. The sun reflecting off the ice sends light dazzling through her eyes, turning them the color of sea foam, as if the past were living and breathing in them. A mirror that shows what was or what could have been, instead of what is. 

“Regret shouldn’t be all you are,” he says quietly, gently. “I don’t know what you’ve done, Missy, but it doesn’t help to hurt. It never does,” he feels increasingly like a hypocrite, “And, I will admit," he acquiesces, “To remember the good times is, well--it helps. It can help piece you back together, those happy memories. They're like glue. Use it to repair yourself, but spend too long recollecting, the glue dries, and you get stuck. I've learned to not live in the past, it… well, it doesn't aid in living in the present."

“Thank you,” Missy says at last, though the Doctor can’t be sure what she’s responding to. “This will be a happy memory.” She swings their clasped hands between them like they’re much younger than they are. “You’re very wise, Doctor; thank you. And thank you for more than that.” 

"Well," the Doctor says, blushing somewhat under her praise, "950 years has to count for something in the wisdom department, I'd hope."

Selfishly, Missy wants to press him to her, lace their fingers together. Instead, she ponders what he said to her. “You’re my present,” she says eventually, with a small twitter at the double meaning. Just now she has, as best she can, laid two souls to rest.

And she does feel lighter.

“Ice-skating, you mentioned?” she asks.

He offers her his elbow to hold as they walk back down the wave. "Ice-skating indeed!" he announces, while the phrase ‘you're my present’ echoes in his head. "It's been a while since I've done it; let's hope the muscle memory persists across the regenerations..." he chatters on as they walk back to the TARDIS, mentioning the people he's skated with: Jackson Haines, Michelle Kwan, and on one memorable occasion, Rasputin. And while he says everything and nothing at the same time, the phrase, ‘you're my present’ seeps into his hearts, acting as both a sore and a salve.

Missy listens to his talk with full attention, half in awe of his ebullience and half in awe of all she missed. He talks blithely about himself without once asking about her, which suits her just fine. It’s charming. It’s  _ so _ charming. And now she knows it isn’t a childish charm: it’s a thoughtful one, a demeanor cultivated and shaped by age. Like hers, but genuine. This Doctor is so  _ genuine _ .

She’s warm in the rainbow coat. Warm on the inside, too. “Rasputin,” she echoes. “How… brilliant.”

“Really? I thought so,” he says, “And you know,” he recounts, opening the TARDIS doors and leading Missy into one of its hallways, “I told him once, I told him, ‘you shouldn't drink that wine, Greg, really; I've heard that that particular merlot is nasty business,’ and later on I found out that it had been poisoned! Nasty business indeed…”

Missy tunes him out. She’s subsumed in that strange sensation again, that extra-sensory anger, the feeling of confinement that seems to bleed into her from the TARDIS walls themselves. It makes her nauseous. It makes her feel like how she felt the last time she was here.

She ignores it, and watches as the Doctor--giddy and positively ‘lost in the sauce,’ as the kids say--crosses to an ornate wooden chest. Throwing open the lid and bending over, he eagerly begins to rummage through it. It’s bigger on the inside (of course), and he’s almost completely engulfed by it in a matter of seconds. Books, coats, cravats, mismatched socks, a venus flytrap, a trombone, and several pairs of shoes are tossed up behind him, one rather large sneaker coming close to whacking Missy on the nose.

The Doctor pulls out a pair of skates with a triumphant “Aha!” before peering down at the mess that now surrounds the chest. “Oh dear,” he mutters. “I'll clean it up later.”

He won't.

“Oi,” Missy calls out quickly, peering into the trunk and pretending to only have just noticed, “It’s bigger on the inside, too. Dimensional folding, that’s only done by one species, yes? Is it your species? Don’t answer if you’d rather not, of course,” she adds.

“Only one species in the universe, yes. Though some have come rather close,” he remarks, putting on his skates. They're old-fashioned sort, the type you strap onto your shoes. “It's Time Lord technology. That's what I am, by the way: a Time Lord.”

“A Time Lord,” Missy breathes. To hear him say it as if it’s just another species, as if it’s just a ‘by the way,’ is surreal. Then saddening. Still, just hearing those words from his mouth strikes a deep chord in her. 

The Doctor doesn’t seem to want to linger on it, though. He’s practically bouncing from foot-to-foot. “Let's go!”

“Just a  _ moment _ , dear.” Missy feigns incompetence. “You might have to hold on to me a bit; I’ll wobble on the ice,” she professes as she dons her own skates, aware that she’s now  _ literally  _ treading a thin line. The Doctor stands up, takes a few steps around to get used to the feeling of standing on two thin blades, and says, as if there’s no question about it: 

“Why, of course; we wouldn't want you falling now, would we?" 

He doesn't catch the possible double meaning of Missy's comment, which is that she simply wants to hold onto him for the sake of holding onto him. Missy offers him her elbow, and he takes it. “Even for a Time-Lord, there’s no time like the present, present,” she says cheerily, leading him toward the doors. “Let’s have fun!”

“Yes, let’s,” he agrees. He finds himself rather wobbly on skates, this body apparently lacking the grace his third had when he learned how to figure skate. He finds himself unsure, in a way that is totally lacking the pressure that a life-or-death situation imposes. It’s nice, he thinks, to have that rush of adrenaline quaking up his spine, to feel his hearts quicken, to know that the only terrible outcome of failing is a few bumps and bruises instead of a few bumps and bruises plus a new body.

He steps tentatively onto the ice, his skate teetering to and fro, wearing a groove into it that prevents its blade from moving at a different angle. His knuckles clutch the wood of the TARDIS tenaciously, steadying his body. “Perhaps I’m not as adept at this as I thought,” he admits, supporting his weight with his arms as his other foot joins its partner. Slowly, inevitably, his legs begin to slide out from underneath him, and he scrambles for a moment to right himself. “This is tricky,” he mutters to himself.

"I've got you," says Missy automatically, catching him on his first slip. She grasps him by the arms and helps him get upright, then steps back a safe distance. This is a sight: the Doctor imperiled, not by Zygons or Slitheen, but by frozen water and unpredictable shoes. She giggles a bit and starts out on the ice, finding her footing fairly quickly. She takes a quick lap around the TARDIS, just to get adjusted to the sensation of being on skates. It's new and a bit unpredictable--and then, suddenly, it's neither.

She circles back around to the Doctor, still clutching at his TARDIS for dear life. "You can use me for balance, if you like," she offers. And then, to show off, she attempts a quick spin--

\--And falls. Slams down in a rustle of skirts and coats, landing with a  _ whoomf _ and the wind knocked out of her. Suddenly, she's staring up at the cold pale sky, shocked speechless and unable to breathe. Then she's  _ laughing _ .

The Doctor, who had been watching with a small smile as Missy skated around the TARDIS, confident and careless, barks a laugh when she falls before immediately covering it with his hand. His chuckles merge with hers, and she's on the ground and getting his old coat wet, and he's struggling to stand, and he finds that this is the least stressed he's felt in a long, long while. 

He's still giggling as he says, "I'll stay right here, if it's perfectly alright with you."

She sits up and they’re still laughing together, eyes crinkled up and bright as the sunlight reflecting off the ice. Awkwardly, she shifts her weight, massages her back, and stands, slipping a little. She makes her way over to him with a couple choppy strokes, disregarding his request. "That's absolutely  _ not _ perfectly alright with me. Come along, Doctor," she wheedles. "Newton's Second Law; we'll be a balanced force. I'll hold on to you; you hold on to me. Neither of us will fall." She quirks an eyebrow. "You suggested this. Surely you won't admit defeat now?"

“There are some flaws in your log—” his sentence is sliced short with a surprised shout as Missy pulls him away from the door. His other arm windmills as he tries to balance. “Missy—you overestimate how prideful I am; you should know that I’ll rather gladly admit defeat.” But even as he says this, he makes no attempt to return to the safety of the TARDIS. He wobbles, and takes a few tentative steps forward, his free arm outstretched. “Steady Doctor, steady...” he mutters under his breath.

"I've got you," Missy promises. She's moving backward so he can move forward. Logically, she knows there's nothing behind her but more ground-level ice, but it still feels like she might bump into something. It takes more strength than she'd anticipated to keep her eyes on the Doctor instead of looking behind her, paranoid. They clunk across the ice awkwardly, Missy finding her footing before the Doctor does. "Good?" she asks, watching him steady himself. "Don't lock your knees," she advises, "Or you'll topple. Bend slightly, perhaps? Lower your centre of gravity. Legs a bit farther apart. Look at us, ice-tango-ing. Delectable."

"Not so much a tango as it is a, a - a very clumsy, uh..." he tries to think of a word, a type of dance that would correlate with whatever odd step movements they were doing, "Well, it actually might as well be a tango, for all I know. I only really specialize in the waltz and a very specific sort of square dance native to Algol."

While he speaks, he attempts to follow Missy's advice, relaxing his knees and squatting slightly. He finds it a much more comfortable position.

“How fascinating.” Missy looks on as the Doctor stabilizes himself entirely, and she relinquishes his hands so he can stand on his own. Satisfied with his ability, she skates a circle around him, then another, starting to smile again. He’s a comical picture, his legs bent and spread, his arms out as a balance, and despite the beauty of the planet, he seems to be only looking at her.

When it becomes clear he’s not going to strike out on his own, she approaches him again. “Did you come out to skate or stand?” she asks wickedly, reaching out. “Come on. I’ll pull you if I have to.”

The Doctor takes a few experimental steps forward, arms outstretched. He remembers, from when he first learned how to skate - oh, a few hundred years ago - that you have to push out and back with your foot to propel yourself forward. He tries this, and is quite surprised when his legs rush out from under him and he falls on his back. He groans. “Bad idea.”

This time, when the Doctor falls, Missy’s first reaction is to sympathize, not to laugh—which is a little bit distressing. She skates over, stretching one hand out as far as it can go to brace it on the side of the TARDIS as she reaches her other hand down to him. “Don’t give up,” she wheedles, pleased to find something else she’s better at than the Doctor. “Who’s going to win? A 950-year-old entity, or an empty sheet of ice? Don’t you want to be a Time-Lord victorious?” 

“The ice is older than I am by millions if not billions of years; it certainly has more experience than I do," the Doctor says, grabbing Missy's hand and pulling himself up. He almost falls again, but she balances him, like she promised. "I appreciate it," he says.

“As you should,” Missy agrees demurely. As the Doctor pulls himself to his feet, their faces are much too close.

There are her eyes again, the Doctor thinks, As sharp as cracked mirrors and shards of sea glass not yet rolled into something smooth. They were piercing as barbs, and for a tenuous, charged moment, the Doctor can’t look away. Missy forces him to, stepping back from him again.

She squeezes her eyes into an artificial smile, holding on to him with one hand so they can move forward together. "Come on," she trills, "The ice is waiting!" 

As they start to skate again, Missy divides her line of sight between the ice and the Doctor, and she adjusts her balance to make up for the extra weight. When the Doctor starts to lean one way, she leans the other to keep them both upright. She, at least, finds a rhythm, and hopes the Doctor is feeling the same. “You know I used to be quite good at this,” he comments, mostly because he hates silence. “Wonder where it all went; probably have the how-to somewhere in my mind, just have to find it.”

“Well," Missy laughs, "After 950 years, your mind must be much like your TARDIS. Bigger on the inside, stuffed through with memories, and impossible to search through efficiently. Rather stimulating, your ship and your…” she flaps her free hand through the air vaguely, “Soul. Look, you're getting the hang of it now! Left, then right.”

Since old habits die hard, she toys with the idea of suddenly shoving him over. But he  _ likes _ her; the look of betrayal would absolutely cancel out any joy she'd derive from the action. Besides, they're moving in unison now. "There now," she says, and flashes him a crooked smile. “Success.”

“Thank you!” he says contentedly, watching their feet as they move in tandem. “It’s not so hard, really. Like pulling a bow on a violin!”

“Really? I’m more of a pianist myself.” Inspired by the swish-scrape rhythm of blades on ice, as well as by the discussion of music, Missy starts to hum a ditty as she skates. She realizes too late that it’s a lullaby from Gallifrey. She swallows it eight notes in, hopes it’s not too familiar to the person beside her. 

Unfortunately, it is.

“That’s a Gallifreyan tune, isn’t it?” the Doctor asks Missy. He’s not at all suspicious. For you see, Gallifrey hasn’t been destroyed yet in his timeline, and it’s culture hasn’t yet been drained from the Universe. There have been plenty of planets influenced by the Time Lords, so it’s hardly rare to know their songs. “Yes! Yes it is,” he exclaims after a moment of thought, “The rest of it--it goes something like--” he hums a few more measures, until the end of the stanza. It’s somewhat melancholy, but then again, most lullabies are.

The song. Him singing it--well, humming it--to her. Missy realises this has happened before; this melody was thrown back and forth between the two of them while they wheeled through the hallways and chambers of the Academy long after classes were over for the night, bumping shoulders as they side-stepped cases of books shut away and chairs stacked on top of desks and lost articles of clothing hung loose on dusty pegs. The two of them, the only noise in the building, singing without harmony, off-key on-purpose, the Doctor adding lyrics that he’d written to express how he struggled in their literature class: “I wish that I could write a sonnet...”

It was fun. Now it’s gone.

Soon, perhaps too soon, they reach the wave. Years ago, it froze mid-crest, neither rising nor falling, pushing upward to—at its apex—waist height. Missy brushes a hand along the top of it, almost mournfully. It’s a force imprisoned; she rather knows how that feels. The Doctor, feeling no sort of sorrow, turns awkwardly around on his skates, and sits, patting the ice next to him as in invitation for Missy to do the same.

The melody has choked her up. It’s stupid. Stupid to sit next to the Doctor, stupid to sing to him, stupid to cling to him like home. Stupid to ask what she’s about to. She does it all anyway.

“If you’re from Gallifrey,” she starts, “Do you think we could—after this—pop by? See it from afar, I mean. We don’t have to land if you don’t want to. But I just—” she sorts her words in her head, selecting the right ones. “The planet means something to me, too. Assuming,” she adds, stopping the nastiness she wants to use from creeping in, “It means anything to you.”

The Doctor’s mouth twists. “I suppose we  _ can  _ go. But just a short trip; I don't want to stick around long enough for them to pull me into whatever politics are going on over there," he says, then heaves a long dramatic sigh, leaning back on his hands before realizing that the ice was, well, ice, and therefore cold. He sits back up. "It's not that it means nothing to me; it's my home planet, after all… it's just that, well…”

“What?” Missy asks, overeager.

The Doctor trails off, trying to think of the correct wording. “They're  _ boring _ .”

“Boring,” Missy repeats, then bursts into a peal of laughter. Because they were, weren’t they? So stuffy and rigorous and dramatic, and—and silly, at times, and yes, absolutely  _ yes _ , boring! She tuned out class after class as a schoolgirl. She’d ponder the mystery of that rune she and Theta had liked; she’d ponder the fluctuating gravitational effects of binary star systems; she’d ponder the drumbeat in her head; she’d ponder the weather! In short, she’d ponder quite literally anything  _ other _ than her work. She giggles.

The Doctor looks at Missy. He smiles, and as he watches her laugh, his smile sprouts into a chuckle, and that chuckle blooms into a laugh--the kind from the stomach, the kind that leaves your abdomen hurting after. When his giggles have subsided, (and he doesn’t know why he had laughed so hard—each one just seemed to leave his lips easier than the last, with Missy), he finds she’s speaking again, and listens.

“Boring,” Missy says a second time, more wistfully. She misses it; not just her planet, her childhood self. She and him do have something in common; they don’t go by ‘the Master.’ Maybe that name will never suit them again.

“But please, yes, let’s see it,” she says, resisting the urge to lean her head on the Doctor’s shoulder. “Even briefly, I’d want to. I’m sure the sight of the twin suns rising is dazzling.”

“They are quite lovely,” he reminisces, thinking about mountaintops gleaming silver and watching the suns rise with Koschei. “Have you ever seen them before?”

“Yes,” she confesses, despite it possibly contradicting herself, “I have. Not alone, though, usually—no, I went with a friend.” She slips into silence. “Maybe more than a friend. That went sour a long time ago. But the red grass stayed, and the mountains. Everything reflected, everything warm, waving in the little breezes we—the planet—has. Deep orange sky. Silver leaves on the trees. You can see why I’d want to go back, can’t you? It’s—” She bites the sentence off. “Well. You know it better than I do.”  _ So don’t forget it _ , she wants to add.  _ Immortalize it now for when you emblemize it later. _ “But this, here, the two of us; this is nice, too. The sun on the ice. Ice-olation.” She hopes he laughs at that

The Doctor is surprised by the pun, surprised by her, and he inhales a gasp and stares at her, shocked, before the laughter catches up to him. "N--" he tries to say, but his word is interrupted by laughs, "N-ice," he comments, making her giggle again.

This planet is so silent, quiet like a corpse, and their voices resonate and bounce between frozen waves, like beats pulsing life into the dead. Two voices--and, though the Doctor doesn’t know it--four hearts. 

"I miss it sometimes, I must admit," he says quietly, "There's a human saying: ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ - hearts," he corrects, "Suppose it rings rather true. I had this friend--” he blurts, “We'd sneak out of the Academy and watch the suns rise, point out which stars we'd visit, once we got out..." he falls into thought, pensive, "Perhaps I just miss him more than the planet itself."

And abruptly Missy experiences something that can only be described as torment. She turns away sharply, her entire body stiff, because he’s just revealed that he loved her, he  _ remembered _ her, and he misses it, he  _ misses _ it—like she does. And she has to wipe the skin beneath her eyes again, dig deep within herself to keep ahold of something strong.

Finally, she sits upright; the whole ordeal was maybe three seconds. “I think,” she manages, “Well. Not all love is lost forever, my—” she swallows, “My dear. Sometimes, when you think it’s dead,” the Doctor’s hand is on his knee and she softly lays her own on top of it, barely brushing his skin, “It regenerates.” She squeezes his hand once, then withdraws it. “At any rate, I doubt you’ve seen the last of him. You Time-Lords get around, don’t you?”

The Doctor barely registers her words; Missy called him "my dear,” and his hearts started pounding so loud he thinks she’d be able to hear them in all this planet's silence. His eyes are open and vulnerable and curious; her face is wistful, melancholic, the frown and laugh lines etched deeper. When she squeezes his hand, he wants to return the gesture, hold it against his own, but she releases him before he can and there's a twinge of disappointment. "Y-yes," he says, dazed, before blinking and realizing what she said. "No," he corrects, "Time Lords prefer to, er, prefer to stay on Gallifrey. Like I said: boring."

“How sad for them; they’ll never see this.” Missy watches the panoramic stillness of the landscape, stamping it into her mind. Suddenly she stands, all business, and reaches down to the Doctor again. Shifting her weight backward to prepare to pull the Doctor upright, she asks, “Skate back?”

Unfortunately, for the past half hour, she’s been—inconveniently—wanting to grab this Doctor by the shoulders and kiss him until he’s breathless. This thing called ‘liking’ (she has no right to use the other word) is a new and a complicated facet of ‘wanting,’ but perhaps one thing she is willing to surrender to. She takes his hands again and pulls him up and practically against her, more daring now, and smooths a wrinkle from his shirt with a pat.

A strangled shout of surprise escapes his lips. He wobbles in his skates, not used to standing after sitting still for so long, and threatens to fall over. But his hands are anchored in hers and he remains in his feet. “Hello,” he says, his voice raspy.

He looks down at her hand on his lapel. She’s very close now, their chests almost touching, and the Doctor suddenly finds it rather hard to breathe. His respiratory bypass kicks in, his hearts knock against his ribcage like fists. “Missy?” he asks, as she almost seems to be in a trance, her eyes distant and hands gentle.

"The thing is," Missy says absently, looking off to the side instead of at him, lifting one hand to curl on his shoulder, placing the other hand possessively on his waist, “You…”

Now, she has her old self back again. She used to be made of urges: the urge to reach into this man and twist whatever she finds to make it hers, to twist  _ him _ and make him hers; this old, odd feeling that drew her to him again and again, barely closer each time. Magnetism or gravity or Gallifrey, it doesn't matter to her any more. It's something bone-deep, soul-deep, something involuntary. Desire for companionship, perhaps, though her analysis of it would stop at the word ‘desire.’

She loses herself in it for a moment, the physical closeness of them, caught as if mid-dance on the ice. Then, with monumental effort, she collapses the moment and steps away from him; him and his tight breathing and the heartsbeat she could  _ hear _ , the heartsbeat that always means home. She clears her throat but finds nothing to say.

The Doctor swallows thickly, his stare still intense and wide. "Me...?" he whispers, trying to hold up whatever this was by continuing the conversation, support it with questions he's unsure he wants to know the answers to.

“It’s a shame,” Missy says, still quiet.

What does she mean? That this won’t last? That this Doctor cares about her? That she cares back? That her path and the Doctor’s diverged long ago?

It’s all these, she realizes. Particularly the last one. This, she knows now, is the life she could have had, if she hadn’t—if he hadn’t—well. ‘It can’t be revisited, one’s personal past.’ But…

“It’s shame,” Missy corrects, her hands finding the Doctor’s chest, if only to feel that heartbeat a moment longer. “That’s what I’m feeling: shame.”

"What? Why?"

The Doctor is confused. He's confused and curious and overwhelmed by the enigma before him. This conversation has taken so many odd twists and turns it's as if Missy isn't even talking to him anymore, only talking to herself, or to someone beyond him. He wants to grab her hand so she can take him with her in her dialogue, lead him to the questions that warranted the answers she was giving. He wants to tuck that strand of hair, the one that had fallen from her ponytail, behind her ear. He wants to kiss her. Maybe then he'll understand. Or not.

“Just,” Missy pushes herself against the Doctor’s body, not erotically, just sort of—awkwardly. She fumbles with his waist, then wraps her arm around it, placing her other hand about halfway up his back. Simultaneously, turning to the side, she rests her head against his shoulder so he can’t see her face.

It’s a hug. A real hug. And Missy’s first. The last time the Doctor had hugged her, it was a different body, it was—the day the woman in the red dress had— _ Lucy _ , she remembers, and even that brings guilt. The Doctor had hugged her as she died.

And here she was, years later for her and years earlier for him, hugging him back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ANOTHER ANOTHER NOTE: the line "i wish that i could write a sonnet" comes from some shakespeare musical paul mcgann sang for. link to it is [HERE](%E2%80%9C)
> 
> hes a good singer and im deep in the genders THANKS


	4. The Gall Inherent in Gallifrey

The hug surprises the Doctor. Missy’s very good at doing that, he finds, all unpredictable and hot like a flame; you never know where it will flicker or pop, where the cinders will singe your skin. He peers down at her, and she's close enough that he can't see her face, only the crown of her head. 

"I must admit," he says slowly, "I'm… confused."

“Right,” says Missy, embarrassed, snapping herself out of his embrace before he can return it. She smooths her hands down her skirt to rid it of (imaginary) wrinkles and stares back up at his face. “Sorry about all that,” she goes on, raising her chin to bring back her self-pride. “You just showed me something beautiful. Something moving, you know.” She gestures flamboyantly to the planet around them, forgets about her skates, and almost falls backward. Righting herself, she turns her lips up at the corners. “I do owe you an explanation, my dear Doctor. Just—” she holds up a hand, “Not yet.”

She steps away, and the Doctor misses the touch, wants to reciprocate it, step closer and—

_My dear Doctor._

There was something about that line that nagged at him, that writhed in unfamiliar familiarity in the back of his mind, begging for him to pay attention. It was too far away for him to reach, however, and he couldn’t quite _remember_. Damn this body and all its forgetfulness! Where had he heard that epithet before?

“I’ll be looking forward to it,” he said, his voice giving no indication to the turmoil within.

“Somehow,” says Missy cryptically, “I doubt you will.” She hums a single note and smiles again in her sharp-edged, insincere way. Donning false giddiness, she loops the Doctor’s arm through hers and starts to pull him back toward his TARDIS, keeping him balanced on the ice. She starts up a steady stream of chatter: “I don’t know why you ever stopped wearing this coat; it’s so cozy!” and “How beautiful that frozen foam looks on that wave,” and “Do you think someone else will see the scratches we’ve and wonder about us?” and “What were you doing on Raxacoricofallapatorius, Doctor, in a diner like that?”

Trite words. Small talk. Fortification.

Unaware of how little Missy actually wanted the responses, the Doctor gave each of her questions a reply: “Look at it and you'll see the answer.”—“Yes, like crystalline lotus flowers!”—“Someone is bound to.”—“After a decade-long search involving me tasting every diner that side of the Andromeda galaxy’s chips, I've found that theirs were my favourite.”

His answers to her comments did well to distract him from the tense, confusing, _electrifying_ moment mere minutes ago. He was very good at getting distracted, and Missy was certainly distracting.

After a few teeters and staggers (aware of the inherent irony, Missy kept him from falling and getting hurt), they make it back to his ship. The Doctor stumbles in and begins removing his skates with a hint of relief. “Gallifrey next?"

For a second, Missy doesn’t answer. Again, she has the odd sense that she’s being watched, that she and the Doctor are not alone, that there’s some angry (and familiar?) presence with them. There’s memories tugging at her head, too. ‘Doctor,’ she wants to ask, as she lays a hand against the inside wall of the blue box, ‘Is something wrong with your TARDIS?’

But if he blinked up innocently at her and said, ‘Why do you ask?’ she’d have no reply. Because ‘Imma keep it real with you, chief; I know what this TARDIS feels like and this ain’t right’ _certainly_ won’t cut it. 

The Doctor’s question—“Gallifrey next?”—scatters her thoughts, and she starts like a jumpy rabbit. Everything flies from her head as she spins on her heel, fixes him with her hungriest stare, and grins, wide and lipsticky. “Yes,” she hisses, feeding off her compatriot’s constant excitement and finally giving him back her own.

The Doctor thinks - if he can do some finagling - he can get the Old Girl to take them to the early days of the planet, back before Rassilon invented the Laws of Time. It's a good way to admire the view without the complications that come with everything else. 

He's been feeling rather nostalgic of late, for no discernible reason (save for maybe the effects a long lifespan can have on the psyche), and decides to take the TARDIS to a special place: the hill he and Koschei had sat on, the one with the tree and rock that had seemed as old as time itself. The tree in which they had carved their initials into, and the rock that carried a mysterious rune they had both tried so hard to translate. Of course, neither landmark would be there this early on, but it’s the principle of the matter—and principles, like memories, are something to hold onto.

The Doctor smiles, calmly punching in the four dimensional coordinates.

Missy watches him, one arm up against the wall. They’re going to Gallifrey, but not _her_ Gallifrey. Not anyone’s Gallifrey, really. Pre-Rassilon Gallifrey. Missy recognises the coordinates; she always had an excellent grasp of temporal mechanics, so she knows where they’re going. Roughly. 

It’s not what she wants, the primal, uninhabited version of her home. She wants the chatter and clamour of people: the arguments between time-tots and elders alike, the ringing of the bells, the music on street corners, the haggling of merchants in their markets, the droning of professors in their classrooms, the laughter of children in their element, screaming through the streets. She wants the full scope of it, the gold and the muck and the _noise_ of it; distantly, she wants her home back. She won’t ask for it, though. This will be good enough. 

She takes off her skates. It occurs to her that, because of them, she’s had blades in her possession (and her oldest enemy at her mercy) for the past hour or more, and she’s had no urge at all to really do anything with that, other than sort of grab at the Doctor and want to deeply kiss him. She chides herself for it; she’s stronger than that, isn’t she?

Isn’t she?

She files it away to process later (or never). She has a home planet to see.

The TARDIS materializes on soft red grass.

The Doctor, for his part, isn’t as excited as he usually is when he arrives somewhere new. Even though this Gallifrey is not of his time, it’s still… boring, grey, gone sour in his mind. It houses bad memories, no matter the century, holds them in a thick fog he can’t help but breathe in. He has taken the TARDIS to a metaphorical oasis, the one location that was good, the one spot not constricting like the rest of the planet. Still, the rest of the planet holds no warmth for him.

When they land, he steps out casually, his hearts at their normal pace, not thudding in trepidation. He glances around and notices that the tree isn’t there, and the rock lacks the carving that had interested him and Koschei so long ago—or, he supposes, so far in the future. “Here we are then,” he says.

Missy, already upset she couldn’t be the first foot on its soil, steps out behind him.

“Oh,” she says, swallowing hard. She knows where they are. 

Because as special as this hill is to the Doctor, it’s equally, if not more, special to her.

She grinds her teeth. So he’ll just take anyone here, is that it? _Their_ hill, _their_ place that will someday have _their_ tree with _their_ initials carved on it— _their_ sanctuary, the closest thing to freedom they, as students, could get. And the Doctor will, what, pluck someone out of a filthy _diner_ and think they deserve to see _this_?

The urge to possess things, to claim them if she can and destroy them if she can’t: it’s familiar, and it fills her. For a moment, looking at the Doctor’s back, her vision spots with a sudden blind rage. Nobody but them should stand here. Nobody but them should _be_ here. She wants to plant her feet and scream. She wants to kill something defenceless.

Physically trembling, she chokes it back. The glare becomes a stare. The rancour slowly fades, and for a moment, she’s not Missy or the Master or Koschei.

She’s just home.

After a long beat, she looks again at the Doctor.

He stands on the crest of the hill, staring out over the untamed land that would someday become colonized with Time-Lord civilization. His hands are clasped behind his back, the wind whipping through his long hair. If not for the red grass, silver trees, and twin suns, he’d look like a character from a Jane Austen novel. 

He breathes in. The air is new here; he can feel the youth in it. The way the timelines are short, the golden threads wavering as they threaten to change with any action they may take, fraying further at the edges into endless opportunities. 

He turns to look at Missy. “Satisfied?” he asks. Not rudely, but not very excited either.

“Yes,” she replies, though she, by nature, can’t be. She too can sense the timelines, their intricacy and their youth. The further back you go, the more possibilities there are, the more paradoxes one can create. Stretching her senses out as far as they can reach, she lands against the valley’s first brush with civilisation; it’s metaphorical lightyears off. They’re in wilderness.

She can see the Doctor’s not exactly ecstatic to be here. It doesn’t matter; she is a fiercer and prouder Time-Lord than the Doctor is, and she can live with that. She takes off the rainbow coat, drapes it over one of the doors. “Doctor,” she says, approaching him and twining her fingers with his almost roughly, “Let’s do something nice.”

Automatically, as if on instinct, he squeezes her hand. He moves closer to her, so their chests are mere inches apart. 

He’s never been good with personal space.

“Oh?” he asks, smiling a bit and grabbing her other hand. “I thought that was what we were doing.”

Missy tilts her head. She really enjoys having the Doctor this close to her; he’s enthralled, and she’s not even trying. “What I mean is,” she strokes her thumb against his, “Sit and watch the sunrise. Then what? What if we made an event of it.” She’s making this up as she goes along, but he’s hanging on to her every word. “Pull some food out. Wine, maybe, if you like that particular human habit. Toast the twin suns.” She pauses. “Maybe spread out a blanket.” She bites back the ‘like we did when we were kids.’ “It seems like the sort of sentiment that would appeal to you,” she concludes shrewdly.

“Like a picnic," the Doctor says, his entire face gradually lighting up. "That _is_ nice! Excellent idea, Missy!” Forgetting the tenderness of the moment, his entire being buzzes with excitement as he takes his hands back. "I haven't had a picnic in ages; how exciting!" He dashes off, opens the door of the TARDIS, and, calling back, almost as an afterthought, says: “I'll go get some food. I should have a suitable blanket somewhere around..." His voice trails off as he wanders into his timeship.

Missy watches him turn from her and zip toward his TARDIS, bitterly considering the image his action has just made. Then she looks across at the unlit mountains, lumped up against themselves and looming stark against the sky. After the initial twinge of disappointment, she’s glad to be alone. She sits just where she always sat, folds her hands in her lap like she used to. When she closes her eyes, she’s timeless.

She scratches a finger into the earth beneath her. It’s good, but it isn’t _right_. Not without the tree and the rune and that idiotic golden citadel, Arcadia, in view.

Not without Theta.


	5. Uno Reverse Card

The Doctor unearths a wicker basket and a blanket from one of the overflowing closets and dashes to the kitchens. He shovels a wide variety of jams and breads, fruits and vegetables, and various sliced meats in, then grabs a tin of biscuits and a thermos of tea as an afterthought. He swerves out of the TARDIS faster than he got in, managing to find three shortcuts and getting lost only once. 

“I acquired a wide variety of jams and breads, fruits and vegetables, and various sliced meats, then grabs a tin of biscuits and a thermos of tea,” he says as he spreads the blanket out, the red plaid pattern blending in with the grass. “I swerved out of the TARDIS faster than I got in, managing to find three shortcuts and getting lost only once!”

‘Magnificent,’ thinks Missy, with a trace of amusement. ‘Of all the Time-Lords to have disgustingly soft feelings for, I picked the one who’d get lost in his own timeship.’

She smiles almost candidly.

As the Doctor unfurls the blanket—above and behind where they’d sat as children, thankfully—she rises and traipses down the hillside until she finds four rocks to pin the edges of the blanket down. The planet is young and warm, like something freshly-baked: it’s practically malleable beneath them. The thought gives her a thrill. She’s more excited now, and not just because the Doctor is. Her bouts of self-doubt and self-contortion are fading as she slips further into the person the Doctor sees her as.

After adequately securing the corners of the blanket, she sits squarely on the center of it, her legs tucked under her and hidden entirely by her mess of skirts. She strips off her purple jacket and folds it in her lap. “Apologies for not helping you,” she says mildly and without much meaning. Then, infusing her words with a bit more vigour: “Very kind of you to bring this out for us. It’s delectable.” 

The Doctor plops down close to Missy, only about a foot apart. "Of course," he says amicably, re-arranging food so it’s all in arm’s reach. "It's my pleasure." 

He smiles at her, his face open and vulnerable and trusting. He's _so_ trusting.

"You know," he begins, his mouth already full of toast, "Planets store memories, especially when they're young. The psychic waves are ingrained in the soil." He doesn't know why he's telling her this. Maybe it's because he's feeling nostalgic for a time far in this planet's future and far in his past, wondering if the ghosts of them will persist until Theta and Koschei will trek the path up here. It’s an odd thought. He’s not sure if it’s comforting.

"I know," she wants to say, but instead she tilts her head and just listens. His voice has an elasticity, a bounciness, but it's grounded; a rich brown colour, a long round note.

She looks at the food spread around them, selects something without looking at it--a tiny biscuit, she realises when it sits in her hand. She crumbles the corner to ascertain its texture, and it disintegrates between her black-painted nails. When the Doctor isn't looking, she crushes the rest.

She looks at the Doctor's face, and she's able to identify what she finds there.

So. She loves him. And that... just is.

Missy doesn't respond to his words, though the Doctor doesn't mind. He keeps talking about psychic fields and the memories a planet holds, the spirits that inhabit it. He constructs a finger sandwich as he does so, peeling the crust off two slices of bread, adding ham and cheese and some alien condiment he was particularly fond of. He takes a break in his monologue to bite and chew, looking contentedly over rose-red grass. Then, he asks the question:

"What connection do you have to Gallifrey, Missy?"

She had been watching him as he talked, realising something. That this is who he is when he’s not moralising, when he’s not preaching, when he’s not guarded—in short, when he’s not around her.

He’s just a person. A physician putting down his stethoscope and heading home for the day.

And then he asks the question, and she flinches, and she _thinks_.

She marked the saving of the Time Lords. She ran away from the Last Great Time War. She felt the death throes of the universe and watched through human eyes as time ran out, moment by moment, for reality itself. She envisioned Utopia. She created Hell. No gods, no ghosts, just her. She’s frozen planets, burned creations; she’s seen things only a Time-Lord can understand. 

She says none of this. “I was raised on its legends,” she admits instead, a curious brittleness to her voice. “Rassilon, Romana, and the Rani. The Corsair, the Hussar, the—the Master. Some of them romances. Some of them tragedies.” She selects and swallows a berry, and the juice stains her fingers red. She looks at the Doctor. “Some of them both.”

“Really?” the Doctor asks, slightly incredulous. “I had no idea our legends spread that far.” He pauses, thinking. “Though I supposed I never bothered to ask, either.” 

He finishes the sandwich. The planet is silent save for the sounds of nature, nascent and new. Then, he casually says: “What sort of things have you heard?”

“Ah,” says Missy articulately, scrabbling for time. She plucks a teacup off the blanket, delicately fills it from the thermos, and takes a scalding sip. ‘ _Uno reverse card_ ,’ she thinks. “What would you like to know? I’ve heard a lot.” By way of explanation: “Time-Lords have a disproportionate weight in the universe, able to manipulate it as they do. They can and do go everywhere, and under the guise of non-interference, mostly... talk about themselves. So I’ve been told, I mean.” 

The Doctor scoffs when Missy mentions non-interference, his disdain still potent even after all these centuries. The way the Time-Lords spoke of non-interference _very much_ interfered in his life. He thinks back on what Missy had said before, the people she had listed. One in particular stood out. 

"...The Master," he says at last. "What do you know?" 

Maybe it was nostalgia, or maybe he missed the Master more than he cared to admit. They had been friends before they had been enemies, and it was this friendship the Doctor thought of when he had reached his hand out as the Master was sucked into the Eye of Harmony and subsequently dissolved in the TARDIS. 

But the Master was dead now. All out of bodies, all out of hope.

Missy passionately wishes the Doctor had brought out wine, because the only appropriate way to react to what he just asked her would be to grab an entire bottle and drain it. Not because it would do anything, mind. Just for the unmitigated drama of it all.

As is, she hesitates for a moment, then looks on the Doctor with her best approximation of a compassionate gaze. She could absolutely bullshit him here, she realises. Say the Master had joined the Q-Continuum, or dyed his beard orange, or married a Dalek on Skaro. The fact that he had asked about her warms her to her core, but she still has no idea what to tell him. What does she know about the Master? Fuck, what _doesn’t_ she know!

“He’s dead,” she says with finality. It’s the truth—at least it’s the truth for now—evidenced by her name and her very existence. She watches his face, then speaks again. “You seem to… care. Did you know him at all?”

Once he responds to that—and she really wants to hear what he’ll say—she doesn’t want to talk about it any more. This is Gallifrey, a stupid stuffy planet that unfortunately doubles as the only place she’s ever been truly happy, and she wants that laughter back. She begins to formulate a joke in the back of her mind, and makes herself a sandwich.

"Oh, yes," the Doctor says, his voice on the verge of a whisper. He doesn't look at Missy while he talks, just looks out across the horizon, where silver-leaved trees twinkle in twin sons. _There_ , he thinks, looking at a particular spot in the distance, _That's where the Citadel will be built, and the Academy..._

He stares so he doesn’t have to think. Doesn’t have to think about the way grief twists and wrenches his hearts in his chest. "We were -- friends," he says at last, "We went to school together; he was the only one who didn't bore me into an early regeneration. We used to come to this hill, actually, and watch the stars as they spun in the sky, point at the ones we'd visit one day. Then he...well. _I_ left Gallifrey without him. I don't quite know what happened after that, but he got a hunger for world domination, for power, and..." he trails off. 

He doesn’t finish his sentence.

The Doctor still puts the blame on himself for what happened to Koschei. If he hadn't left, maybe they'd be up in the stars together, and Koschei wouldn't be the Master but something else, something softer.

Missy, pulled by an impulse almost beyond her control, reaches across and pulls him to her, tangling him into a second embrace. In her vault, she stewed in her grief and her guilt, forging it sharper and sharper, and she knows exactly what she would have wanted someone to do for her: this.

She squeezes him tightly, grounding him, fixing him back to the present, then separates a little from him, kneeling so they're nose to nose, both hands wrapped around the back of his neck. She smooths a strand of hair down the side of his face. Their eyes are so close; his are huge and sad and _she's done this_.

"I met him once," she confesses, and it's true, because she remembers at least some things from that Mondasian ship. Her voice is hurried and choppy, hurling words out before she can think better of them; her fingers nest themselves, half-desperate, into the Doctor's hair. "I know more than I told you--the Master, I met him, and I want you to know that he loved you, that he did, that he was narcissistic and sociopathic and so, so _wrong_ ," she presses her forehead to his, just briefly, "But he loved you in the only way he could, and he's not sorry. But I am, because I see more—I hear more—I _care_ more, Doctor, than he ever did—" she breaks off with a tiny gasp, afraid of the weight of her own admission.

"He's dead," she finishes, voice low and passionate. "But I'm here."

The Doctor doesn't register what's happening until it happens, until he's pulled into Missy's embrace and her face is all he sees, all he really wants to see. Her words tumble over him, only half-registered, only half making sense. Her glass-marble eyes don't reflect anything, not like they had before. He doesn't see himself in them, only her. Slowly, tentatively, he raises his hands to her hips so she's steady on her knees.

There's a pregnant pause. The Doctor doesn't blink, doesn't breathe. He’s not confused by her speech. There are no questions drifting in his mind about it, no “how do you know?”s, no puzzles or perplexities. She had said it as if it were a simple fact, so forceful and sure that there were no doubts to be had. The meaning of it blooms in his head: _I’m here._

It feels as if they're tethered to one another by more than their arms, like their fates - pardon the expression - have been woven together by Lady Time.

She's familiar and unfamiliar and the contrast is hypnotizing, and he doesn't even know he's asking it until the words slip from his tongue, the question riding on the wind of his breath, quiet and gentle.

"Can I kiss you?" The Doctor's face is open and unguarded. His eyes are much the same.

Maybe it's wrong. Maybe it's wrong to ask this, when he’s known her for an hour, when he's standing—well, kneeling—on the hill where he'd been with Koschei. But timing was never really his cup of tea, despite being a Time-Lord particularly fond of tea. His eyes glance down to Missy’s lips, coated in lipstick that matches the grass and the sky: a deep scarlet.

He’s staring at her. He’s staring at her like he loves her, like he _adores_ her, and the look in his eyes as he drops then to her lips sends a shudder to Missy’s core. His hands are resting on her waist. Her hands are buried in his hair. This is precarious. They are close. They are so _close._

She wants him so bad she can’t breathe. 

She lets herself stay like that for a moment, bound up in the desire she has for him, her breath sharp, her body taut and curving toward him. Mentally, physically, she clutches him. It’s her and the Doctor on Gallifrey—and they’re holding each other, and he wants to kiss her, and she wants to do all that and more, and the look in his eyes says he’d probably let her—and picnic be damned; _this_ is what she had starved for. And the Master doesn’t deny himself what he wants. 

But Missy does. 

Aching, she slides her hands out of his hair. She inhales carefully and tries for a smile that sputters and falters and dies. “I want you to,” she says, and her words scrape her hollow. “I do.”

 _Then why can’t I?_ She can read it in his face. “You’d regret it,” she tells him, and all pretense of reserve is gone. Her syllables are cracking like grief. She wants to drop her forehead on his shoulder and leave it there. “You’d regret it, my dear—friend. I know you would.”

She cups the back of his head briefly, then releases it, drawing her hands down his chest and letting him go.


	6. Reprise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lots of things happen in this one. This is because the authors feel bad for the long hiatus and have made it so that lots of things happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi. pretend we posted this a year ago. thanks

The Doctor blinks, and the spell is broken. His hands release their grip on her hips and they just hover there, a few inches away. 

"Right," he says, his voice breaking like porcelain. His gaze leaves her face, looks down and away. He swallows thickly. "Apologies."

He regrets a lot of things, so many things that he can't ponder most of his memories too long without feeling the telltale bitter wrenching of guilt in his chest. But he doesn't think he'd regret this. He doesn't regret the people he's loved. 

He doesn't regret love. Despite the pain of loss that can come with it, that comes with letting it go.

“Nothing to apologise for,” she responds sweetly, leaving a light kiss (so soft it won’t even leave a lipstick mark) just beneath his hairline. “You’re an open-hearted soul. Very much a gentleman. Gentleperson,” she corrects. “Gentle person.” She takes his hands in hers, resettles herself so they’re sitting side-by-side, and drapes one of his arms around her shoulder. They sit on the blanket, her head on his shoulder, using him to support its weight. 

This entire conversation has been a rollercoaster, and the Doctor finds that he's incredibly, immensely confused. He didn’t move of his own accord after she kissed his forehead, the brush of her lips against his skin faint, like a ghost, he just stayed there, let her move him like a puppet, put his arm over her shoulders. 

A sliver of the first sun is cresting the mountains, spreading rays of colour onto the grass of the valley below. “What do you call it,” she asks, looking at the Doctor and making sure he can see her smiling, “When the founder of Time-Lord culture is being rude?” She pauses. “Crass-ilon. And when he’s being snarky? Sass-ilon. When he’s being his ordinary self? Ass-ilon.” She waits for him to react, then asks him, “How many paradoxes does it take to climb over a wall?”

She's telling jokes, he realizes, which is even more of an emotional whiplash than before. A surprised giggle bubbles in his throat, which turns into a chuckle, and then a laugh. "How many?" he asks.

“One,” she replies succinctly, settling into him a bit more, “If it pulls itself up by its bootstrap.” Oh, the Doctor must be horrendously confused with all the complex reactions she’s hurled at him and expected him to juggle—but at least he’s laughing. She tries another paradox joke; she likes them. 

“So,” she begins, “You lose one of your socks; it’s not on your dresser. You go back in time two hours and—surprisingly—see it on your dresser. You pick it up off your dresser and go forward two hours, then realise the reason it wasn’t on your dresser is because you went back in time and picked it up. What would you have then?”

She waits. “A pair-a-socks.”

The Doctor laughs, a deep belly laugh that has him almost doubling over. He rights himself, still giggling, before sighing. He leans his head on Missy's head, which is leaning on his shoulder.

"I wouldn't regret it, you know," he says quietly out of the blue, referring to Missy's earlier statement.

“You would,” says Missy simply, gratified by the Doctor’s laugh. She removes her arm from around his shoulders to work her fingers into his hair, stroking it like she did for Theta, who would stifle a moan and arch his back into the touch. “I don’t mean any offence to you,” she continues. “The last thing I’d want to do,” she twists a strand between her fingers, “Is lose you. You’re a bit like a star, Doctor. Warm, twinkling, hard to look away from. I require stars, I think; I look at the sky and insist on them. But get too close and you’re pulled in by their gravity, and burned.”

She nestles into him further. She doesn’t want to lose him; that’s the simple truth. Not only does she want him, she wants him back, wants their childhood back—it cuts keenly, here of all places. Their love was formed from an innocence they used to share; Koschei painstakingly stripped it from himself, and Missy can’t reclaim it. But here, on Gallifrey, the space between then and now seems to collapse and shift, to fold itself together like Missy folds herself into the Doctor’s side. 

She loves him, and it’s wrong. But it’s good.

“I wouldn’t burn you!” he wants to say, wants to repeat it over and over to convince himself as well as her. But he knows it’s not true, and he knows, as the searing brand of guilt threatens to burn his throat out, that she’s right. People burn because of him, shrivel and disintegrate because they get too close. Katarina, Adric, C’rizz, Charley—oh,  _ Charley _ ...

His chest feels too tight, his skin feels too tight, his hearts feel like fiery nails being hammered into his rib cage. The Doctor extricates himself from Missy, untangles their limbs until he’s separate and she’s safe. 

He scoots a few inches away, masks the reasoning of the act with the excuse of needing to spread jam on a piece of brioche. He isn’t hungry. 

“I suppose,” he begins, though his voice sounds sad to his ears, and he stops and tries again. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Oh, come now,” she says, exasperated, “I don’t mean that. Jerking yourself away from well-meaning affection like a petulant child, Doctor, really...”

The Doctor sighs. It comes out labored and strangled, fraying at the edges. He hugs his knees to his chest, resting his head on them and turning away. “I’m not petulant,” he says, petulantly. 

He’s sad, she realises, as she picks up a single grape. Once again, she’s made him brittle. Well. Good to know she’s still got it. 

He’s probably remembering some human he loves more than her, she reflects. That’s fine. That’s absolutely fine. The fact that the grape has just been squished between her fingers is pure coincidence, really. 

The Doctor’s face is an open book with regret written on every page. Feelings can’t be anything but foolish, Missy knows—and yet his grief sends a pang through her. She doesn’t try to touch him, unsure if he’s ready for that yet. Lightly, she clears her throat until he looks at her, then carefully remarks, “I just said the last thing I’d want to do is lose you. Please, Doctor; it’s rude to give someone a present and take it away.” She smiles. “Look at the suns,” she suggests. “They’re beautiful.”

After a few seconds, a few heartsbeats, Missy clears her throat. He reluctantly turns to look at her. There’s ice; cold and callous, in his eyes, because if there wasn’t ice, there would be water, and the water would flood past the dam of his tear ducts and drip and fall. 

But her words cause his hearts to melt. He tries to prevent his eyes from melting with them. 

“It’s rude to give someone a present and take it away,” she says, and he knows she meant him, but he can’t help but apply it right back to her.

He peels his gaze off Missy and lifts it to the sky. “Different constellations,” he says, his voice muffled by the velvet sleeve of his frock coat his mouth was still buried in. “They’re billions of years young than mine.”

And they were beautiful.

She sees herself in him, suddenly. In the way he's narrowed his eyes slightly, suppressing something that hurts him. The light in them is focused like little chips of ice. Cold without indifference, what a talent that is.

Missy used to relate most to fire, to the energy and heat of it, the chaos of smoke and the beauty of ash. Now she feels more like stone, a stupid, bludgeoning force. She's misstepped again somehow, and now he's running far away in his mind, away from her like he always does, leaving her to scramble, claws out, after him--because when all is said and done, she wants him near her.

She focuses on the Doctor's words. "Mine, too," she says distantly. Guilt sneaks up on her again, and sinks her; at least one star system she can currently see will someday not exist because of her.

Maybe Missy's more like water, now; that's what's in her eyes, at any rate. "Did you know," she says after a moment, laying her hand on the blanket not far from the Doctor's side, "I had a friend like you. He was--not at first; he grew into it--a bit of a healer. If you're anything like him, I suppose you'd be glad to know that I've been happier since I met you. And better, too, I think." She pauses. "I want to get better," she confesses. "I never meant to hurt you in a way I couldn't fix."

A tentative smile crawls its way onto his mouth, small and hesitant. His face shows his vulnerability, in the curvature of his brows and the lift of his lower eyelids. He turns to look at her. "That does make me glad," he says softly, his words like a tightrope walker on her stretch of string, balancing and wobbling, threatening to fall.

The Doctor swallows thickly, and nuzzles his nose on the velvet of his arm, half of his face still burrowed in the ball he's made of himself with his knees. "You didn't hurt me," he assures her, voice still quiet and considering, "It's just the side-effects of living a life as long and turbulent as mine; reminders of bitter moments and bitterer regrets are hidden about like a minefield; take one wrong step and..." he weakly makes the sound effect of an explosion with his mouth.

“Well, I promise you,” Missy says, letting a shred of real mirth into her voice, “I have no intention of exploding.” 

He’s 950 years old, she remembers. How much older than him she is; how much older than him she feels. The suns are up, too bright to look at, but she does anyway, feeling their light fill her and ground her, strengthen her again. She holds her hand out briefly, stretching bony fingers into the air, as if she can cup the glow and keep it. 

“There must be happy stories, too,” she says, dropping her hand back to her side. “Loads of laughter buried in those open hearts of yours, perhaps a sort of well to draw from. But if it hurts you, thinking of it now... you can tell me.” That’s vulnerable, so she adds: “I’ll gladly listen; you’ve a beautiful voice.” She smiles at him, then returns her gaze to the Gallifrey sky. “It might help you.” And me, she thinks. She wants to learn his love. 

She wants to earn his love.

The Doctor doesn’t return a quip at her comment, just tilts his head sideways so it’s laying on his forearm. He’s peering at her, his eyes unguarded. 

This body trusts too fast. Or maybe it’s just good at finding people to trust.

He tries to think of good moments, and all his brain can tug up from its depths were his times with Charley and C’rizz, charred at the edges like fire lapping the edges of paper.

“Even laughter becomes tinged with the bitterness of loss,” he says, his voice rough and weighed down. “Like a ripe fruit turning acrid with age, mottled and moldy with grief.”

Missy tilts her head to match him, blinking at him sideways in the post-dawn light. “Doctor,” she says, without meanness, “Are we going to sit here and toss sad metaphors back and forth until this bread goes stale?” She flicks a crumb at him jovially, resettles her skirts, and uses that as an excuse to shift closer. 

Picking an apple from one of the baskets, she bites into the top of it as delicately as she can. “Here’s a ripe fruit,” she observes, tossing it high and catching it one-handed without looking away from the Doctor’s face. “Not old, not acrid, just sweet.” She takes another bite, then chooses her next words carefully. “I don’t know half the life you’ve lived, but I’m here for this part of it, and I assure you, I’m worth something. So,” she goes on, exasperated, “Do scoot back over, you lovely but obtuse fellow. You’re warm, and I want you close.”

A smile reluctantly tinges the sides of his lips, and he childishly buries his head in his knees as he scoots closer, leaning slightly into Missy. 

He thinks on her words, tumbles them in his mind like raw stones. She's right, he knows; she's telling him things he tells himself often: live for every moment, every person. She's worth something, and so is everyone else, and it doesn't much help to get stuck in bouts of melancholy. "You're right," he says, nudging closer to her.

“Of course I am,” she replies tartly, then softens into a smile. How long she’s wanted to hear the Doctor say those words, and how much more quickly he might have released them to her if... Well, if she’d been kinder. Or even just better at pretending to be. For what it’s worth, she’s not pretending now. 

He’s nestling into her side and she curves herself around him; the apple, unnoticed, rolls off to the side. She seeks out his hand, laces their fingers, rubs her thumb back and forth lightly along the ridge of his knuckles. 

When she gets out of the vault for good, she decides, she’ll return to this moment. She’ll turn off the brakes and land her TARDIS silently on a nearby hill, watch her and the Doctor—this moment of joy—from afar. She plans on it, picks a hill far out of the Doctor’s line of sight and surreptitiously looks over at it, genuinely expecting to see her future self. Any new regeneration. Any figure standing there. And... nothing. 

So that’s it, then. 

She doesn’t want to think about what might happen—what will happen, what has happened—on that Mondasian ship. Death is for other people. It is.

She clutches the Doctor closer. Comforts him.

“Of course you are,” he replies, and feels better. He loops an arm around her shoulder, brings her closer, and leans his cheek on the nest of her hair, 

Maybe it’s the setting; the twin suns falling and making ways for the stars, the wind weaving its way through burnt-orange grass. The rock, which — even though it lacks the rune, and was jagged and rough from youth —still housed some familiarity. It was their hill, their place. 

Or maybe it’s the person. Missy had — and he’s just realizing this now — a way about her, as if she were deja vu personified. She reminded him of someone, but a lot of people reminded him of a lot of people.

Either way, everything around him, the sights-sounds-smells, influenced his next words, which emerged from his mouth without much thought at all:

“Thank you, Kosch.” 

It was quiet, admittedly, whispered into the wisps of flyaways in Missy’s hair, but voices carry.

She gets four seconds.

Four seconds of him pulling her close, wrapping an arm around her, leaning on her, and then--

_ "Thank you, Kosch." _

She snaps away and stares at him, feeling as though someone's taken a knife to the base of her spine. One hand starts trembling. He doesn't know. She can read it in his eyes, in his trust of her; he doesn't know. And if he doesn't know, what the hell does he mean by this, and why the hell did it hurt her? Viscerally, spasmodically hurt her? 

She swallows hard. "We should go," she says, insistent but kind (her best shot at kind), and not at all shakily. (Very shakily). "Doctor, we should go." She has her hands on him even as she says it, almost uncontrollably clinging to the touch. "You--you go back to the TARDIS; I'll," she gestures to the remains of the picnic around them, but that's not what she's referring to, "Tidy up. The dawn's been witnessed. Let's--leave the planet to its daylight, hm? Let this patch of grass we've been sitting on see the--suns, the--" she swallows again. "The light." On impulse, she cups his face before he prepares to stand, but can't think of anything to say, and lets her fingers fall from his cheek.

The Doctor realizes what he said after he said it, and he doesn’t sense the change in mood until after Missy parts like she’d been slung away. He reaches for her, and listens as she talks, his face crumpling and confused and so incredibly lost.

“Missy, I—“ he begins, because what he said had upset her, and he didn’t mean to, he didn’t even mean to say it. “I didn’t—“ 

The Doctor follows her as she stands. “You just,” his eyes flicker briefly away, “you remind me of someone, is all, I didn’t mean anything by it. Missy.”

“Missy,” she repeats, as if suddenly remembering that’s her, “Yes, that’s my name; I like it when you use my name...” She trails off, pats him on the chest almost awkwardly because they’re standing very close. She musters courage, tries for a jauntier pose. “I suppose some people do remind you of others,” she says, harkening back to their earlier talk. “I hope you quite loved this Koschei of yours; I really do.” She takes his hand, squeezes it hard, stares at the spot where she used to sit and then at the sky with him—and bizarrely thinks ‘ _ I’m sorry _ .’ Unsure of what it means, she takes a careful breath and forcibly calcifies her feelings. “It’s all right,” she tells him, and it is right, somehow, that he call her this, here and now. 

“We should go,” she repeats. But she lingers a moment longer in her favourite place, on her favourite planet, hand in hand with her favourite person, who burns brighter in her than both suns.

The Doctor is confused again, which isn’t nearly as rare an occurrence as he’d like in the presence of Missy. He glances down at the two of their hands, intertwined, and wonders why she makes it so easy to remember. Usually it’s hard, his mind blockaded by emotional barriers that he’d put up himself, reminders to not visit certain memories again, lest he get twisted up in all sorts of nostalgia and grief. Missy had, however, for all intents and purposes, waltzed right past these walls, slithering through cracks of cement until it was difficult to not remember.

It takes him a moment to realize that he hadn’t said Koschei’s entire name, but by that point he was practically being shoved into the TARDIS, while Missy remained outside and straightened up. 

He blinked in the low light of his ship, who seemed to hum her sympathy. He leaped up to the dais and patted the console in response, staring at the doors Missy had slammed shut.

…

Fruits back in one basket, breads (not that there’s much left) in another. They’ll find this hill spotless (well, sans the tree and rune); they should leave it spotless, too. New facets of her personality are shining through in the glow of the post-dawn suns. She can sense it, like a flower finally given enough light to bloom. Very much like that, actually. 

When she was young, when she was Koschei, she wanted to beat the world down—to build it back better. Then, somehow, the second half of that sentence got lost. Now, somehow, the first half has. 

She cleans quickly, brusquely, eyes focused on the red grass and the half-gold soil. Whether she wants it or not, she’s a representative of this planet now, a tether to its former-future glory. One-half of the remaining active timelords. And that gives her a responsibility to this place, not just a power over it. She cleans it carefully, then. It’s her place. It had better be beautiful. 

The apple she’d abandoned has rolled off to the side and is now resting in a tiny divot of earth. She reaches to pick it up, but stops, her fingers hovering just inches from its surface. There will be a tree there someday, won’t there? And apples have seeds. 

She leaves it.

...

He shakes his head forlornly, scrubs his hands down his face tiredly. 

How did she know Koschei's full name? 

Dread begins dripping into his hearts, the sort of dread steeped in realization, like some sort of bitter tea. There's really only one way she could have known, really: she was a Time Lord that had attended the Academy with him, back when he was Theta Sigma and not the Doctor. But if she was a Time Lord, the question was: which one? She must've been a part of the Deca, since she knew the Master's school name.

The Doctor nonchalantly puts a song on the gramophone, a plan slowly taking root in his mind. A fuzzy, static-ridden melody began after the needle crackled on the vinyl record.

Perhaps she was a newly-regenerated Ushas, or maybe Mortimus or Magnus. He figures he'll find out soon enough, but first he's going to give her a chance. Maybe he's wrong, after all. 

He hopes he's wrong.

The lilting beat of a waltz meshes with the reverberation of his hearts beating loudly in his ears, and he stands by the console, and he waits.

...

Missy finishes clearing the scene and stands in a fluid movement to stare out at the vista of her planet. She can see it as it stands, barren and wild; in her mind's eye she can see it as it rises, blooming and urban, and she can see it as it falls, burning and cracked. Home is a complicated concept; it's as heavy as you make it. Like guilt. 

This will be, in all likelihood, the last time she sees Gallifrey--and she takes time, while she has it, to say goodbye.

Then she steps back into the TARDIS, into an atmosphere awash with music and the sense of safety, where the Doctor is still looking at her with infinitely more gentleness than she deserves.

She sets the remnants of the picnic down. "I've cleaned up," she says, meaning it in two ways, and smiles.

“Thank you—“ the Doctor cuts himself off before he says Missy, the name stuck in his throat. He shackles his distrust away; ties it to the tight knot in his stomach where it sinks, heavy like a stone. He smiles and takes the wicker basket from her hand, tries to act like nothing was awry. His plan wouldn’t work if he let anything on.

Turning, he walks over to the squashed arm chair and places the basket down, ignoring the paranoia prickling at his back at not facing her. Then, he spins around and claps, walking up to Missy and offering an arm. 

“Let’s dance,” he says grandly. “Do you know the waltz? I was there at its conception—in fact, I might have given Johann Strauss a couple pointers here and there,” he winks.

Missy watches with slight perplexity as the Doctor puts the picnic basket, instead of himself, on the armchair. The perplexity grows when he asks her to dance, but it quickly melts away into an upswell of affection.

"I do know the waltz," she replies, taking his arm gratefully. "I typically lead--" and because that's perhaps a tad revealing, she tacks on a half-meant "--If you don't mind." She starts to slot herself against him, but as she drapes a hand across his shoulder, she goes still. A memory rears its head and blurts itself, ugly, across her mind.

Waltzing on a rooftop, ashes in the air. Imaginary music--she had been the Master, then, so this wasn't long ago--and she had been dancing with... well, someone. Doesn't matter who, now.

She rips the scene to shreds and pulls the Doctor closer. "What song is this?" she asks, starting to sway just a little to lead him into the dance. "It's lovely."

The Doctor puts his hand at her hip, his hearts beating in time with the music, jumping and lilting. “Alright,” he says, his tone good-natured and tinged with humor. His fingers clasping hers, he begins to follow, stepping back, to the side, forward. One-two-three, one-two-three, focus on the steps, not on the possibilities the future may hold. 

“Khachaturian’s Masquerade,” he says, “Composed for a play of the same name by Mikhail Lermontov. I was there at its first showing in 1941,” he brags breezily, and for a moment he gets lost in the macabre melody, the memories, the candlelit console room. For a moment there’s only Missy and boisterous strings. He steps marginally closer to her, their chests near-touching.

Missy hears the music; she closes her eyes and dances. The melody of the Masquerade--and the irony of the waltz's name is not lost on her, as she applies it with some vexation to herself--is turbulent but measured, wholly out of sync with the alla-breve rhythm of each heart. It tumbles over itself, percussion straining to be heard above the strings. It's uplifting, up-tempo, too intense to ignore, and she smiles, leading the Doctor into increasingly energetic steps. They make a striking picture, the two of them in their period garb, velvet green and swirling purple. If the song were any slower, Missy might... oh, she doesn't know what she'd do. Something soft, though. Gentle, even.

As is, she spins herself away from him and then back, landing in his arms again with a tiny giggle. She's too clumsy about it, though, and her forehead hits his, knocking against it gently. She pulls back to apologise, then finds he's staring at her. Her words stop in her throat; all she can manage is a surprised puff of air and a quiet "hello" to his suddenly too-close face.

He's beautiful, she realises. He's distinctly beautiful. But he's always been beautiful to her.

His face breaks out into a genuine grin - one that he hopes is somewhat rakish. "Hello," he responds, his voice smooth and maybe a little bit sultry. His smile dims slightly when he remembers Missy's possible betrayal, remembers why he's doing this. This had never been just a dance.

Their steps have stopped, the music fades into obscurity in his mind. Now or never, Doctor, he thinks, as he loosens his hold on her shoulder, raises his hand to her neck, right where her jugular is, seeking out a heart--or hearts--beat. Her skin is cold against his palm, but he doesn't ruminate on it. He's too busy building the courage to do what he's about to do.

He kisses her.

The moment seems to freeze, freeze like Woman Wept, freeze like the waves that had reached their zenith, and had frozen before they could fall and crash. For a second he forgets that this moment will fall and crash. For a second he wishes his TARDIS were like Woman Wept, frigid and freezing so they could freeze this moment, freeze this time so it was just this. Just his lips on hers in a way that felt so incredibly, innately right. 

For a second, he forgets to measure her pulse.

  
  
  


For a second, she forgets not to kiss him.

Waltz time, 3/4 time, is characterised by a sway, by a sweeping instability. The strings careen around them, tightening like a rope, baroque and theatrical. It's frenzied: wildly intricate, wildly melodic, half-insane, and out-of-time.

She makes a small horrible sound as he kisses her, fists her hand in his coat, and drags him closer with uncharacteristic desperation. The kiss is too much--it's not nearly enough. She snaps herself away, staggers back on her suddenly unwieldy heels, and stares across at him, unsteady. She's flushed and despairing.

She's out of time.

She passes a hand over her eyes. Something inside her has come unstitched, and now whatever gives her shape is dissolving, piece-by-piece, through her frame.

"I need to tell you," she manages. "I need to--" She stifles her words but not her emotion. Years are flicking by, behind her vision. UNIT. London. San Francisco. Bristol. Rome. Home.

“When we were kids, you loved me," she starts. "Stupidly, selflessly, helplessly, you loved me. That’s gone now; I understand that." She self-corrects: "I deserve that. But I ask you, in memory of the person I was and in honour of the person I will be, to let me explain who I am.” She stops; it's painful to meet his gaze, but she meets it fiercely anyway. She clasps her hands in front of her and speaks like a recitation. “I am the person you watched the suns with. I am the person you gave a brooch to. I am not a good person. I am not redeemable. I am maniacal and lethal and I am your oldest friend. I am in love with you. Every version of you. And I am—I am—sorry.”

Each of these has been one clue, one pin in a padlock unclicking, and now she pulls back the deadbolt. “The first thing you said to me, at the diner. You remarked that what I’m wearing is rather odd for the time and place. To which I would reply— _ I always dress for the occasion _ .”

**Author's Note:**

> follow [me](https://eightdoctor.tumblr.com/) and [kora](https://aziraphalesbian.tumblr.com/) on tumblr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


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